


The Velveteen Soldier

by bookstorequeer



Series: The Velveteen Soldier and the Prodigal Son [1]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Foster Care, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Homosexuality, M/M, Secret Relationship, Violence, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-07
Updated: 2012-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 17:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookstorequeer/pseuds/bookstorequeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Does it hurt?" asked the [Velveteen] Rabbit.<br/>"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."</i>
</p><p>An exploration in Speirs. This is a look at the biggest bad-ass of Easy, from a young age living with his parents in Maine to old age living with his partner, Second Lieutenant C. Carwood Lipton, in Montana. How did he go from being the quiet boy no one wanted on their baseball team in PE (even if he could run the bases faster than anyone else) to being the quiet foster father of four? From being a war hero and CO of Easy Company to being a handyman that all the women in the neighbourhood called upon? From being rumour-riddled and nightmare-haunted to being loved and care-worn? This is the story of how Ronald C. Speirs became Real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART I: In which there is war

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2010 War Big Bang on livejournal, this fic is accompanied by [amazing art](http://flyingmachine.livejournal.com/249696.html) done by and a [great fanmix](http://zellersee.livejournal.com/18980.html) put together by of livejournal.
> 
> A special thanks to Don, my beta for this project.
> 
> Originally posted [at my livejournal](http://bookstorequeer.livejournal.com/91738.html).
> 
>    
> (With regards to the "Character death" warning - men die in war and men grow old. That's the way that life goes and I cannot avoid that. Unfortunately, neither can these characters. [But it doesn't happen until the epilogue.])

\----------------------------------------

PART I: In which there is war

\----------------------------------------

_"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse [to the Velveteen Rabbit]. "It's a thing that happens to you."_

 

**Chapter 1.**  
His mama always told him that it wasn’t a big deal. That sometimes people just wouldn't understand him. That the differences would wear down after a while. That the kids at school would come around once they got to know him. But he knew the things they said about him. It was written in crayon on their foreheads. They didn't know the meaning of subtle and she didn't know that he sat on the swings every day and didn't say a word. He ignored them before they could ignore him because he had been able to recognize that puzzled, unhappy look since his father had started throwing it at him.

He told himself it didn’t bother him that they ate at different tables, that it wasn’t his problem if they didn’t want him on their team in PE. He would rather climb the jungle gym than play football; rather run the track alone than play baseball. When they did let him play, he ran harder, threw farther, and they won. But still they didn’t want him. They said, through one small boy voted spokesman, that they didn't like the way he watched him. They were afraid of him.

He sat on the swing after they told him, not watching the spokesman shooting glances over a thin shoulder like his anger might follow. He stared at the toe of his shoe trailing in the sand until his third grade teacher came out to get him for math class. He followed, docile in his thoughts.

Mrs. Mann didn’t bother trying to get him to talk. She'd given up. She sat him at his desk in the corner, a sheet of problems in front of him and an afternoon to pass. He pretended that he didn’t care. He pretended right up until the door at home closed behind him. Then he tried not to flinch at his father ignoring him, and sat in a corner of the kitchen not watching his mama cook. He couldn't find the words to explain the things hot and hungry in his stomach that he didn't understand; the things that everyone else seemed to see and hate in him.

He was grateful for the fragile wings hiding beneath the light weight of his cotton shirt when his father glared at him over their meat and potatoes. He knew someday he would leave this place, these people. Someday.

 

Years later, gangly in a growing body and awkward in himself, he sat quietly in front of the principal's oak desk and tried to listen to the words going over his head. At nearly sixteen, they told him that being sent to military school was usually a threat or a family tradition. Since he had never seen his father spit-polish anything, he knew the invitation had more to do with his bloodied knuckles and split lip. He didn't know how they expected him to just ignore the whispered things that he wasn't supposed to hear. The rumours clung to his skin, soaking in until even the horsehair brush in his mama's hand couldn't wash them away. That old brush could scour off dirt and blood but he had never known it to get at what he wished it could.

They told him that military school would teach him discipline; he was more concerned with the other boys learning it. They told him they would teach him to channel his anger; he didn't bother to explain to them that it wasn't his anger he was afraid of. His discontent was reserved for the things inside of him that he couldn't grasp tightly enough to pull to light. The things that would never haunt him worse than from a military academy high school cot that first night, as if he had never slept peacefully anywhere else.

He knew he would always be able to picture the look on his father's face once they had gotten home from the angry talk across that polished oak desk. His head was still ringing from the principal's speech about the rigors of the academy doing him good. His father's hand was a steel trap on the flimsy bones caught in his shoulder and he flinched as he was steered towards the dining room. It was a room of awkward silences and disappointed stares. He hated the dining room.

"You're going, boy."

He stared at the man who was supposed to be raising him and nodded dutifully. He already knew that. It had been decided when he'd come out on top of a dogpile involving the son of his father's boss. He didn't bother to complain when his father took the opportunity to swear at him for getting into trouble and for getting caught in the first place. He saw his mother hesitate on the threshold of the kitchen; their eyes met but he couldn't find the words he wanted to make her listen. She turned away before he could find a gap in the words his father was spitting.

The next morning when his mama made him blueberry pancakes but didn't say a word, he mentally crossed another day off the calendar. His bags were packed and sitting on the worn floorboards in the front hall a week before they were sending him off. His father sneered at his quiet anticipation but his mother squeezed his shoulder and slipped him the St. George medallion she'd gotten from his uncle when the man died. The patron saint of soldiers was still warm when he ran his fingers across it. He found a new pair of socks and a handkerchief he carried to Normandy at the bottom of his suitcase and he knew that his mama was thinking of him. He smiled to himself, then, wishing that being homesick didn't have to hurt so much.

The sensation of loneliness and the aching for 'familiar' only got worse as the sound of tinny artillery crackled overhead, echoing from an old PA system as a cacophony of sympathetic noises. He knew it wasn't really raining mortars and death because he wasn't in fatigues yet, and he had overheard their XO telling Winston that it was only to get them used to sleeping anywhere. He found he had more trouble dealing with the night-time noises of 13 other boys than he did imagining each blast overhead as a starburst of fireworks. If he closed his eyes tight enough, he could almost imagine the splashes of colour across the blanket's crumples and folds.

On their third night of the firefight orchestra, he turned his back when he heard Charlie Winston whimper again. There was nothing he could think of to say that their XO hadn't already said and that should have been enough. He waited for sleep and gunfire to drown out the sounds of homesickness around him. He ignored the echoes of it in his own chest.

 

They awoke him at dawn each day and each day he was unsure if he'd ever gone to sleep. After that first day it was difficult to tell the difference between the things he was afraid of and what they put his body through. He could do the academics —that had never been the problem but it had been the reason he'd been bored half the time, before— but the team building, as always, eluded him. He ran where they told him, jumped when they told him, and helped his bunkmates when the slowest slowed them up, providing as much nonverbal encouragement as he could because sometimes he still couldn't find the words he knew were supposed to be there.

He often felt them watching him; he didn't see how that could mean any one good thing and made sure to run faster, push harder because he refused not to be good enough for military school. They might have never wanted him for his abilities in the first place since this was more of a threat than a family tradition but they were damn well going to keep him; he had grown used to the rigors and drills. He wasn't sure what he would do without the rigid regiment of classes, drills, and PT to sculpt the chaos in his head. He hated the way certain thoughts would sneak up on him when he wasn't looking; when his drill instructor was shouting at him, he could ignore the rest.

It was when they got their down time that he would start thinking and he would start getting those looks that he hated being able to recognize. He started spit-shining his boots until lights out, running laps of the obstacle course when his homework was done, and doing callisthenics when the other boys were writing letters to the people they'd left behind. His paper was left blank, unnamed; his stamps unstuck and envelopes unsealed.

At first it was difficult to do the things they wanted him to without thinking. His brain was always turning over orders until he could see _why_ and then he could act with confidence and ability. As the months passed, physical obedience began to come easier; his body would react to calls for all the things it had done before without consequence. Eventually he was able to respond without thinking to those orders barked at him. That's when they had him jump higher, run harder, learn faster. Again, he struggled but when they were done he came out a second lieutenant able to bark and follow orders as well as they could.

He was nearly twenty when he signed up for the paratroopers, not for the extra money that he had no need for or the extra training before they shipped him off, but for the camaraderie they said would come from close-quarters in the belly of a plane. He signed up because he could still hear that boy in the third grade and that other in sixth telling him that no one wanted him on their PE baseball team, that he couldn't play with them at recess just _because_. He could strip a field rifle in well under a minute but he still couldn't manage to get his bunkmate to hold his gaze for the same time. He hoped that the PIR was made of sterner stuff.

He signed up because he wanted to be a _good_ soldier and everyone said that paratroopers only took the best. He told himself he signed up to make a dent in Germany but, really, he signed up to spit in the face of all the things that made him shake at the thought of taking a life, the dreams he already had of blood warm across his hands and dirt beneath his fingernails. He signed up to squash down the things he didn't want to face, those things that made his father dissatisfied with him without either of them saying a word. Things he could never admit without being thrown out of the life he'd scraped together. Things he couldn't and wouldn't admit to anyone, even himself.

Under the hoarse bark of his CO, the days blurred into a mess of PT, classes, and duties. He went through the motions they asked of him without complaint and without a word. Before he was ready, he was twenty-two and they were offering an officer's commission and a transfer to the Airborne. He went because it had been in his plans and his father had told him not to bother coming back home. The acquiescence was bitter on his tongue but he said "Yes sir" and packed up his bunk without saying goodbye. He didn't think any of these boys-cum-men would miss him, even if they had lived in each other's pockets for the past six years. He remembered their names for a long time. It struck him as strange that for years the masks of the dead he saw in his dreams were those baby faces.

 

At Toccoa, in freshly minted Second Lieutenant's bars, with a perfect crease running across his knee, he saw the odd vaguely familiar face and spent half a minute one afternoon wondering if they were remnants of his past or figments of his dreams. Either way they couldn't touch him and he wrote them off in favour of listening to a new CO bark at him and forcing his body up a half hour early so that he could shower and shave in peace. The water was cold most mornings and sometimes, half asleep, he would amuse himself by signing his name on the mirror. He always ended up swiping the plate-glass clean, angry at himself for daydreaming. There was no place for reverie in this war. He always shook his head, dressed, and went back outside to join his D Company in a run up Currahee or in doing patrols or in practicing giving and taking orders.

He could see E Company across the compound. Easy. Always just across the compound. They were every bit of camaraderie that Dog Company wasn’t. He would watch Sobel yelling at them, some Private having to do the Easy-twelve-mile Friday run again, without drinking from a full canteen this time, and he knew from the looks between them that the soldier wouldn’t be running alone. _He_ always made extra runs of Currahee alone. Dog looked at him like he was crazy but he knew that if he was going to survive this war, do some real damage to the Krauts, then he would have to be as good as, if not better than anything Herbert Sobel could turn out.

That’s when the rumours about him started. They said that he ran Currahee for fun. That he never slept, never ate. That he beat up men from other companies just for looking at him. He didn’t bother telling them that it was never fun to watch your own back, to know that you were running alone even when the company was at your side. He didn’t bother trying to explain to them what it was like to reach the summit and know that you’d done better than Sobel could pull from Easy.

Dog looked at him strangely when he ran through the woods instead of sticking to the cross-country paths when the company did day and night runs. His CO took one look at the determination on his face and didn’t try to stop him from the things he did. He still ran with the company when he was expected to but didn’t bother trying to tell them that there wouldn’t be any footpaths in Europe. Now wasn't the time to get used to it being easy. Eventually, he learned to run the woods more quietly than they ran the paths and it was worth the trouble to be able to startle Dog at three miles, ten, twelve.

He marched with the company when they did their time on the twelve-mile track but he never sang the songs. Their CO never took issue with it, so after some tentative ribbing without effect, no one bothered to mention it. By then, Dog was used to him going days without saying anything more than “yes sir” or “no sir.”

If anyone had asked him — and if he had felt like answering — he would have had no reason for why he stopped talking casually. He just never seemed to have anything to say to Dog Company. By the time he noticed, it had been too long to come back from.

It was easier to let himself remain mysterious than to face knowing that these men were going to die. That Weir, who liked dark but not milk chocolate, would be struck down over the fields of Normandy before hitting French soil; that Long, who had a baby girl back home, would go down under a mortar attack in the early hours; that Nicholson, who was still a goddamn virgin, would take out three Krauts on a night patrol but fail to see the fourth. He felt like he could fight with these men without those details in his head, without thinking of those inconsequential things when there was enemy fire pinning them down and blood on his hands.

It was more difficult when he became their platoon leader. Then he had to speak to them, to put them through their paces but also to keep them together. He had to watch out for them while those superior to him were telling him to do things that would get them killed. He knew he would never be liked for pushing them as hard as he did, for shoving them as close to survival as a glare and a threat could manage; he would settle for fear as long as it wasn’t the same hatred as he had seen in Easy for Sobel. He would settle for keeping alive as many of these men who refused to be his brothers as possible.

He told himself that he didn’t want Brothers when he could have the Arms and the rush of adrenaline that came from taking a life in his hands. When he lay on his bunk or in his foxhole, cold and stiff or bloody and bruised, he would often wonder what his mama would say if she could see what all this war had done to his eyes. He imagined she might not be able to look at him but he liked to pretend, instead, that she would rub the dirt from his skin with a corner of her ever-present apron and invite him inside for iced tea and his favourite shortbread cookies. Whenever he saw a soldier opening a care package, he would get so homesick he could taste those cookies in the back of his throat. He stopped checking in at the post office and the memory went away. He always found it easier to sleep when the memories went away.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2.**  
It was dark and it was July. D-Day+20 in Europe and he was tired from fighting nonstop but when the CO ordered him, he jumped. They told him that the plan was to get across the Neder Rhine river, scout the Kraut-occupied town, and get back without anyone noticing. They told him the plan and he stuck to most of it. It was just too difficult to ignore the fact that he knew he could do more. He wasn’t about to send one of his men on what could be a suicide mission but it didn’t even occur to him not to send himself.  
  
The night was still, the water surprisingly cold as he swam across and crept, shivering, up the enemy bank. He had known the murky, muddy water could jam his at-the-moment-favourite field rifle but he felt naked without a gun so it was strapped securely against his back. The raw patch of skin where the muzzle rested was the one part of him that he couldn’t feel stinging as the wind picked up and blew sand and ash into his eyes. He took a moment to wipe his face clean and get his bearings, chancing a glance across the river to where he knew Dog was watching.  
  
The ground was rough, tugging at his fatigues as he crawled further up the bank to the shadow of the nearest house. Resting his head beneath the windowsill he heard “alkohol” and “ein Kartenspiel” and knew that this was not the house he wanted. His CO wouldn't care that Private Donker had just won the poker hand with a mittful of aces. He crept farther into the town without stopping to worry about the things that might happen if he were captured. He knew he would not be captured alive; the knives at his hip and ankle, and the gun across his back would see to that.  
  
The encampment was quiet with the lullaby of night to still it. He bit his lip and tasted blood before his breathing would calm to something faint enough to move ahead. From there, it was a house playing poker, a house playing gin, a house planning a mid-morning invasion, and a house counting bullets. He might not speak enough German to be his own translator but he had a great grasp of gists and knew that there were things going on here that his CO would be happy to know about. More importantly, he knew how this town could be taken with minimal casualties. He listened for longer than he would have expected someone else to, filling a page and a half of his own scratchy writing slipped into a waterproof bag, before heading back to the river. He surfaced partway across before he took notice of the gunfire riddling the water all around him. It wasn’t until he was hauling himself out of the water on the friendlier side that he noticed the burn in his backside and the way that the water running down his thigh felt warmer, somehow.  
  
Later, in his cot, he pried off his boot and poured pooled blood on the floor. His toes squished in it as he slid the sticky leather back on; he would find the medic eventually, but for now he had a meeting with his CO as soon as he’d dried himself off. It wasn’t until the Captain remarked on his blood-sticky fingers that he even noticed how his shoulder throbbed. He wanted to ignore that too but the Captain ordered him to report to the infirmary and he wasn’t about to disobey, especially over a couple of scratches. He lay quiet, docile, through the medic’s stitching, trying not to notice the stench of bloody disinfectant and cotton bandages. The dressings made his skin itch and he struggled with the urge to tear them off. The doctor told him to be careful sitting down for the next while because he’d damaged tissue and the last thing either of them needed was a shot in the ass turning septic. He agreed to keep the bandage on because he wouldn’t let the medic keep him overnight. He ignored the tired sigh behind him and shut the door quietly so as not to wake the injured.  
  
His hands shook more than they usually did when he was trying to unbutton his shirt; he slept in his boots because he didn’t have the energy to pry them off. He awoke in the morning twisted and wrinkled. He snarled at the cook and ate alone like he always did; no one seemed to notice if he ate more quickly and sat more gingerly. If he wanted to favour his left shoulder, he refused to let it affect his performance. He was in nearly top form as he lead his platoon back across the river a day later to take the town. He was running and shooting and crawling at the head of his men without a thought for split stitches and blood running down his thigh. But ignoring it didn’t help make his temper any better and it didn’t help when he stumbled over a drunken officer from his own platoon who refused to stop marching forward. He was barely aware of the eyes on him as he shook Sergeant Hoffman, trying to get more than unintelligent drool from the man.  
  
They had no time for this. Battle was not the time to discover that one of your officers was of German descent with entirely too many SS contacts and inclinations. He stared at the man he’d been serving beside for the past lifetime, thinking of the men they’d lost on D-Day, all the soldiers who died so that this rat-bastard could keep sending intelligence about  _his_  Company to the Krauts. No one had told him that there might be a traitor amongst his own men. He had a gun in his hand, cocked and fired, before he’d realised he wanted to move. It was only with the burn of gunpowder and the stench of body matter in his nose that it occurred to him that it was now his word against a dead soldier’s service record. He had no proof to back up what he knew in his gut was true about American-born soldiers being called back to the motherland by their German family, about how easy it was to brainwash a  _child_ , until friends from childhood became the enemy and an accent from South Dakota was worth more than gold if messages could be sent across enemy lines in German.  
  
He was shaking as he stumbled away from the scene. There was still artillery in the air but he couldn’t hear it. He had just killed one of the few men in Dog that he said good morning to, one of the few he could still bum a smoke off. He knew the man had been a traitor and a dangerous mole and that this was war where you can’t afford weakness; but that didn’t change the fact that he had just been responsible the death of an American soldier, at least on paper. He might even have to write the letter to a family back home and explain what it was like to not feel guilty at all for doing your duty. He started writing the letter in his head as he was telling his CO Captain Gross what he’d done; as he was dodging shells and shooting other German enemies, in the right uniform this time; as he drifted off the next night with the knowledge that his CO was dead and with that man died the inquiry into his conduct. It was officially over but that didn't stop the rumours from following him.  
  
He wrote the unsent missive over the following weeks, telling that elusive addressee that he knew he should be sorry that he’d done it, that he hadn’t even hesitated as his men watched on in horror, but he wasn’t sorry and he didn’t think he could be. It was difficult to regret killing a German soldier when he was watching his men, those he had served beside since D-Day and before, disappearing beneath a whistle and a pound of mortar shell. It was impossible to regret killing a traitor when he knew it was his duty.  
  
He told himself those lies and others but it was still cold in his foxhole deep in Bastogne's frozen earth, waiting for the next shell to fall. The ground was icy and frozen beneath his fingertips. He would sit in the intermittent dark of 0200 firefights and pick at the walls of his sanctuary. A part of him was almost tempted to bury something, some sign that he had been in this very spot, slept among these tree roots and been unable to rest below ground-level here. But he had never found anything that meant enough so he never had anything to leave behind. He had a canteen with his name etched into it, the St George medallion his mother had pressed into his hand still warm from her own palm, and he had his dog tags. Anything else was army issue.  _Everything_  else was army issue.  
  
He often found it lonely in those foxholes. Not so much with sex in mind but for a warm body who wouldn’t look startled when he opened his mouth to do more than bark an order. He couldn’t have spoken to any of his men if he wanted to. Which he didn’t. It would have undermined too much for them to know how scared he was when the sounds stopped and the forest was completely still. It always made him think that he hadn't seen the enemy creeping up or that the shells just hadn't whistled this time but were still falling. He couldn't tell the men that sometimes after a nightmare all he could taste was blood on his tongue and feel ash in his hands. He couldn't tell Dog Company that. It would expose too much and leave other, more dangerous things visible. Things that could destroy him. So, instead, he spent his downtime looking at maps and the reports of enemy activity he wasn’t even supposed to have. He lay still before sleep, composing letters that he wouldn’t send to people who would never notice when they didn’t arrive.  
  
The higher-ups, when they came to speak to him about Dog, told him that he could request a tent, that he could have another blanket. They told him that a pillow came with the command but he never took them up on it. He didn’t see the point when he wouldn’t rest any easier. The ground was just as hard wearing when bars or wearing chevrons.  
  
He dug his foxhole like the rest of the company, from the top down. But they whispered that he slept with his eyes open and his gun cocked, ready to shoot the Krauts in his dreams. They said that he slept on the bodies of the Germans he had killed that day. They said that he didn’t feel the snow, he was so cold. He started taking his meals by his foxhole after the started whispering again.  
  
When they were advancing and there were shells like snowflakes in the air, blowing apart the soil beneath his feet, he just focused on covering ground and keeping his gun pointed away from his body. From there, killing Krauts had become instinct; he fired at everything that wasn’t someone he recognized and tried to trust his Company to watch his back. He had last seen Smith to his right and Priede had started out somewhere on his left. He knew that he was supposed to be as worried about his brothers as himself but he figured they must have been step-brothers from a man he disliked more than his own father because those protective feelings were missing. He knew he would throw himself between artillery and another Dog paratrooper but it would be out of a sense of duty, for the good of Dog, rather than out of individual loyalty.  
  
He wondered, sometimes, if there was something wrong within him for not being instant bosom buddies with his Company. But then he saw the way they hoarded letters from home to be doled out like gold for favours and he knew he could never fit in Dog. He could fight with Dog, he could kill Krauts with Dog, and eventually he could lead Dog, but he wouldn’t  _fit_ . They still shied away from standing close, like he would kill them as soon as look at them. And he didn't trust them enough to reach out first, too fearful of exposing his shameful, disastrous pieces.  
  
It only got worse after one night when a German patrol tried to sneak through their line and he was the one to get there first. Afterwards, he could hear Dog’s whispers following him like a smoking gun, flaring up old rumours like a heat source. They said that he loved killing Krauts, that he got jumpy in periods of inaction, as if they all didn't, waiting for the hammer to fall. They said that he had offered those damn POWs stolen cigarettes and then killed all six, ten, twenty of them on D-Day. They didn’t say that one of the prisoners had made a lunge for his gun, that he had had to wrestle the muzzle free with bloody fingers before he could fire it at all. They didn’t say that he had needed sixteen stitches and sometimes his pinkie still went numb. They didn’t say that because he had never told them.  
  
He told them where to run and when to shoot but he never told them when a piece of mortar lodged itself in his shoulder blade or that the tree which fell across his foxhole had pinned his leg to the dirt for half the night. He never went to them when he was aching to hear some kind of happy news from home; but then, he didn’t see them coming together for much more than the bare necessities of mess and when they were marching once more against the enemy. Sometimes all he could see was the division within his Company. That’s when it was difficult not to remember the closeness of Easy and to wonder if this war had managed to bring them closer. Sometimes he caught glimpses of them when marching, when trading foxholes, when R&R settled into their bones. They were there on the periphery of his own Company and he couldn't help watching them.  
  
But the first time he met Dick Winters, ex-CO of Easy and current Battalion Commander of the 506th PIR, as more than a man of a higher rank telling him what to do, there was snow melting into his boots and enough gunfire in the air that he very nearly flinched. They were taking Foy after living in the woods for what felt like forever, and Dog Company was the second wave, ready to move in after Easy. It wasn't supposed to be anything difficult, just another dangerous day of warfare. But then, over the weapons’ screaming, he heard the Battalion Commander telling him to relieve some idiot named Dike and to “take the company in.” Then he was running. He was running to Dike, brainless CO of Easy, and trying to decide what the hell was wrong with the man to have checked out in the middle of an assault on the enemy. He got no response beyond a blank stare and quickly turned away to pull the Company together; he was going to get them through this.  
  
They found their positions without question and he found himself beside First Sergeant Lipton, meeting anxious brown eyes and feeling something that was everything  _bad_  about himself. He forced in a breath like everything was fine, told them to wait there, and ran through the town and the German ranks with a silent gun. He vaulted over a low wall to I Company, waiting for action behind the Kraut troops. It would have been just as easy to fight from there with I Company, but something was pulling him in another direction. On his run back through the amassing Krauts, they fired after him but he ignored the gunfire and just ran faster. He had known there would be no footpaths to jog down in Europe when he was running Currahee.  
  
By the time he made it back to those frowning, awe-filled brown eyes, he felt like he had run twelve miles and back, his breath ragged in his chest. But by then Easy was staring at him like those rumours might just be true but they wouldn’t mind as long as he was on their side. He told himself that now was not the time to wonder if or how things would be different. He took a deep breath, scanning an unfamiliar, bloody face for injury before he nodded at Lipton and scrambled back to his feet. They had a town to take.  
  
  
In the end, it wasn’t the same in Easy. He knew that by how insistently Winters had been that he step up to save the company. He had yet to see another Battalion Commander who would pull in a man from another company to command what used to be Winters' in the heat of battle. He wasn’t sure he should appreciate the faith it showed, if the desperation in Dick’s eyes at the time was of any indication. The Commander would have run across the field if Captain Nixon would have let it happen. As it was, Dick Winters was stuck with a rogue agent, with more rumours than medals strapped to his chest and there were a good number of those. He knew that if this association continued, if he wound up as Easy's CO, he would have to settle for earning the respect of the Captain and he was fine with that. He could see that Winters was a good man, if the loyalty of Easy was any indication.  
  
He was a little uneasy about starting again with a new Company but he knew he could do right by these men and their friendship was not required to do so. He had become inured to standing alone through his time in Dog. He felt a brief pang for his old company but knew that Second Lieutenant Matthews would do fine without him. The men wouldn’t try as hard for Matthews and the man wouldn’t push them as far but he had trained them right. They would do him proud without his continued presence. Besides, he had a feeling that rumours would do well to invoke continued obedience just based on the fear of a surprise appearance. Probably bearing cigarettes.  
  
Of all the rumours, he disliked that one, the one that had him willingly giving stolen cigarettes and then bullets to the enemy prisoners without blinking, back on D-Day when the battle was new. Not that they always got the number wrong and made him out to be callous and cruel, but that as a result he had no one to smoke with, no one willing to stand in the early morning, drawing tobacco into his lungs to chase away the smothered screams of his nightmares. He didn’t like the way that first cigarette always tasted like gunpowder. But he told himself that he never noticed the difference until there was a Second Lieutenant Lipton standing beside him with a Lucky Strike between stubble-rimmed lips.  
  
The early light was unflattering to them both and he couldn’t stop staring at Lipton, sure that he was dreaming and any minute now the Lieutenant’s body would explode in a blast of gunfire across a surprised face. When that didn’t happen, he just couldn’t understand Lipton. He was sure that his reputation had ruined his chances to make a Brother in any sort of Arms but the Lieutenant was beside him, silent, for three mornings in a row. The air was cold in his nose and he watched as the other man nodded and smiled, exchanging the pleasantries never offered to him by men walking past. He nodded to them, saluted when required and only ever said “Good morning” to Winters or Nixon.  
  
“You know, sir,” Lipton said one morning after he had finally relaxed into the idea of having a quiet smoking buddy. “They’d say good morning if they didn’t think you’d bite their heads off.”  
  
He frowned and raised an eyebrow at the man, his mouth opened to speak. The Second Lieutenant continued before he could utter any words or expletives.  
  
“I’m just saying that you have a certain  _reputation_ , Captain.” Those brown eyes twinkled at him; he tried to swallow the rising warmth in his chest at the easy, comfortable familiarity of Lipton. “And it’s a damn shame, sir. I’m sure you have a wicked sense of humour beneath those bars.”  
  
He stared after the man walking away with a whistle and a quiet word for every soldier that was passed. He said “Good morning, Lipton,” the next day just to watch those eyes light up and that mouth break into a smile so wide it nearly lost its grip on the cigarette. He plucked the Lucky Strike from unresisting lips with a smirk of his own and lit the thing before handing it back. Their fingers brushed, cool and callused, and he could have sworn the Second Lieutenant blushed before looking away.  
  
From there, their mornings were no longer silent, although some days he was still too mired in his nightmares to respond with much more than an upraised eyebrow or a twitch of his lips. Those days he was grateful to Lip for filling the silence with pointless stories about the men, which went a long way to explaining how Easy had become so tight-knit when Dog had stayed at arm’s length even while fighting shoulder to shoulder. Dog had never had common enemies beyond the Germans to band them together, like Easy’s Sobel and Dike fiascos. He was nearly grateful when Lip reassured him that there would be no Speirs-mutiny if only because the men were too afraid to make moves against him.  
  
He surprised them both by telling Carwood that he sometimes disliked his ever-pervasive reputation because it had kept anyone from coming close enough to get to know. It had stopped him from making friends of the men, even as he was afraid to. Lipton just grinned at him and nudged his starched shoulder without saying a word. He found himself smiling back, contented when nothing else needed to be said.  
  
It wasn’t long before he overheard the men talking, musing on the growing relationship between him and the Second Lieutenant. He hated the panic and shame that coiled in his gut, making him nauseous as the night lightened to morning. He hated the way his fingers shook with paranoid fear. He knew what the army did to men who felt like he did; he just couldn't stop himself from caring about Lipton more than he'd ever worried about anyone else. He would have done more than appear around the corner and glare at the whisperers, regardless of how guilty it made him look, but he was clueless as to what could help the situation and Carwood had fallen ill caring for the men after Foy and a lifetime in the woods of Bastogne. He needed to make sure that Lipton was resting like he’d told the idiot to. He’d make it an order if he had to. He just didn’t like the way Lipton looked; the man kept coughing when he wasn’t looking —like rumours never made their way back to him— and walking around with those god-awful bags under fever-bright eyes. He wanted to wrap the Second Lieutenant up in cotton wool and barbed wire and the urge startled him enough that he did it, forcing Lip to take the bunk that was supposed to be his, bundled up in commandeered blankets with strict instructions to  _stay_  there. He was tempted to sleep closer —in the same bunk came to mind— but he knew that even he might not be able to write that off, even if it would make it easier to check on the Lieutenant throughout the night. He settled for lying close on a nest of the blanket Carwood forced him to take and the lumpier pillow. Sometimes he would wake up and just listen to the laboured breathing above his head, staring at the side of an army-green blanket and the hand that had fallen off the edge of the cot.  
  
“You’re a worse mother hen than I am,” Lipton teased, voice hoarse from coughing and muscles weak from shivering and shaking. He just shook his head, huffed, smiled, and tucked the blanket closer around those pneumonia-sick shoulders. Again he was tempted to lend his own body heat to Carwood’s bodily comfort but contented himself with a hand that lingered atop the blanket, where he could tell himself he was gauging the invalid’s breathing. Their eyes met and neither dared to speak when Carwood’s clammy hand curled around his. He found himself loitering at that bedside, then, unwilling to pull his hand away even after he couldn’t meet those brown eyes. When duty called him again, he smoothed the blanket for the millionth time and shut the door quietly behind him. His hand felt unbearably cold without a fever-weak grip to cover it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some themes in this chapter may disturb some readers, as it deals with Episode 9 of Band of Brothers: Why We Fight - where Easy Company discovers a concentration camp.

**Chapter 3.**   
He hated waiting. Hated sitting around, wasting time when he could be doing something. It was useless to sit around while the higher-ups jerked each other off; it brought to mind all the things he was trying not to think about. It gave him time to catalogue the ways his body ached, how difficult it was to pry his tongue from the roof of his mouth, and the way Second Lieutenant Lipton looked in the afternoon sunshine.   
  
There were things he would rather not notice himself noticing. He would find himself staring at the way Lip smiled at some private or another, the way that he could still feel where Carwood had leant against him half-asleep at breakfast mess. He really hated waiting. He found himself jealous of Carwood’s canteen because the man would lick that metal mouth after drinking. That’s when he snatched some ratty paperback from a passing soldier and spent the rest of the afternoon pretending he cared about the murder of some banker in 19th century London while the sun burned the back of his neck.   
  
After that he started cleaning his weapons whenever he found himself with downtime. It had the benefits of beautifully maintained munitions, bolstering his sanity, and keeping the men from bothering him with anything but the most important missives. It didn’t stop Nixon, Winters, or Carwood from seeking him out but they weren’t the men he was hiding from. They weren’t the ones that he would be caught by; they were the ones he was watching.   
  
He watched Dick and Nix because he was amazed at their audacity or their stupidity in being so blatant with their affection for each other. He thought it must be like Nixon's drinking and his own propensity for unauthorized violence —they were good at what they did and this war needed all the soldiers it could get. He’d never seen anyone command like Winters and with Nixon beside, they rarely stepped wrong. He hoped that  _he_  was more subtle in his surveillance because he knew he wasn’t irreplaceable. He just couldn't seem to stop, couldn't seem to convince himself that he should want to.   
  
Carwood Lipton he watched because he couldn’t help it. The man made the world less shadowed when nightmares clung to his skin, made his hands stop shaking when he couldn’t do it himself, and all without saying a word. He found that he appreciated that silence, especially in light of the chattering noise of Easy. Lipton had a competent calm that he came to crave after days and nights filled with machine gun fire and men who would never admit to each other that the one crying out last night was them. But Lipton was different. With Lipton  _he_  could be different. He could sit for hours, going through correspondence and over maps with Carwood at his elbow, neither of them breaking the silence. Anyone else and the stillness would lengthen, growing fat like a pregnant balloon until someone took it upon themselves to break it.   
  
Carwood, though, would know the word he needed, would hand him the pen just out of reach, would fix his coffee with the three stealthy spoons of sugar and the hint of cream he never admitted to anyone. If anything was going to make him love C. Carwood Lipton, it was the hot, perfect coffee on a spare corner of his desk that always accompanied Carwood getting one.   
  
It was just too easy to watch Carwood when he was bored. Because he would never spend time staring at Second Lieutenant Lipton when he had other things pressing on his attention, just like he would never imagine those lips, that face, when he got a spare moment of privacy. He knew he was gone when he turned away from the promise of a rare decent mess to eat canned peaches in his bunk because Carwood had a craving and you can’t eat peaches alone, so could he please come with? He couldn’t refuse those dark brown eyes anything and, anyway, the peaches were an elusive sweetness on his tongue. They tasted even better from Carwood’s when the Second Lieutenant kissed him. He gasped, fingers white-knuckling the army issue blanket beneath him like this was a rollercoaster. He wanted to grab a hold of Carwood and never let himself let go but then Lipton was pulling away, all terrified sweetness and heart-pounding adrenaline like you could never find on a battlefield.   
  
He knew he would never be able to say all the things thick in his throat so he settled for his fingers wrapped around Carwood’s and those chapped lips against his again. Lipton’s smile when he pulled away was worth all the fitfully blazing fireworks in his chest. He didn't bother fighting the urge to smile back. He always had more smiles for Carwood than for anyone else.   
  
They had always been close because it was so easy to be and they grew closer still after sharing stolen kisses. He kept finding reasons for private briefings and to wake up late at night just to watch Lipton sleep. He knew it was dangerous and scary and maybe even wrong but there was something  _right_  about Carwood warm against his side. He didn’t see how that could be anyone’s business but theirs.   
  
He surprised himself by being tentative as he reached for Carwood. It was quiet. The company was on R&R, scattered across this town and the next, and his hands were shaking as they fumbled with those buttons, those shoes, that belt. His heart was pounding and he could barely hear the sweet little groans Lip was gasping as he sucked on that silky neck. He froze when his tongue wandered across the scar tissue as young as their friendship on a stubbled cheek and the man beneath him stilled. He raised his head to meet those hazy brown eyes, lips still parted and slick. A heartbeat passed between them that felt longer than the entire war and then Lipton was hauling him down for a hungry kiss that made his lungs tight.   
  
He pulled away with a moan and met his Lip’s gaze as he ran a calloused fingertip across the raised flesh. This time he heard his lover’s sharp breath and felt the shudder in that heartbeat. He was smiling as he ducked his head again and proceeded to make Second Lieutenant Lipton come in his uniform like some dirty corporeal. He laughed when the other man swore at him and stole a kiss that made Carwood smile again, even as he pushed himself a little harder against that slick crotch. Just the thought, the memory of Carwood Lipton coming apart beneath his lips and tongue, in his hands and in his arms, was enough to push him closer to the edge his own blissful release. In the end, it was a hot palm pressed against his zipper and Carwood’s mouth on his; he came apart in those arms, holding on to the shoulders that carried Easy. Afterwards he kissed Lipton until their bodies were calm again and they were content to settle together like there wasn’t a war and a company of their men just beyond the door, like they weren't playing with a hungry, dangerous fire.   
  
  
They went like that for a long time, stealing moments and seconds that lasted just long enough for them to make it another week, until they could come together again. Some times were easier than others. Some times a look or a brief touch would suffice. Some times he couldn’t stop shaking in the middle of the night. He would hear the fighting and the screaming and all he would be able to think about would be the feel of blood between his fingers and the smell of gunpowder in his nose. No one ever heard him throwing up behind closed doors and empty foxholes. No men ever came to check on him when they did, no one queried him about it the next day. No one seemed to notice, not until there was an arm around his shoulders and a gentle hand on his forehead. He’d never realised how cold he was until Carwood was pressed against his side, murmuring softly into the darkness around them. He gasped and choked, spitting to clear the taste from his mouth. Lipton sat with him until the nightmares faded, just resting shoulder to shoulder without saying a word. Sometimes he needed that silent reassurance of understanding more than he needed air.   
  
But sometimes, no amount of subtle support could make it okay. Like the camps. The fucking death camps. Camps filled with the walking dead that Perconte and the rest of Easy's patrol had found. he wasn't sure how none of them had smelled the death before the gates opened. He didn’t know what to do with that situation. The camps weren’t something that could be solved by his knife, his gun, or his grenade. They couldn't be salvaged by kissing Carwood, either, and some days he felt like that was the answer to everything. He followed Nixon and Winters, hoping to be given an order towards action but they seemed just as shocked, stunned, and nauseous as he was. He tried not to listen as the skeleton was speaking but the odd German phrase he understood crept through and he felt sickened, hearing it from the mouth of the walking dead. Horror and anger flashed through him, leaving him hot and cold in their wake; he wanted to kill Krauts but at that moment he was surrounded by German victims.   
  
He spotted Lipton across the compound and nearly flinched at the naked anguish on the man's face. Only the knowledge that he couldn’t touch Carwood, even if he got to the man through this mire, stayed him. That would only torture them both. It was hard enough being in the same regiment some days and he knew that tonight there would be tears from both of them. Even now he could feel his fingers start to shake, taste the bile on the back of his tongue; it mixed with the rancid smell of death seeping into his uniform. He flinched when one of the war's victims brushed against him and handed over his canteen without any thought to getting it back.   
  
At the periphery of his awareness, where Carwood always was, he could hear his lover mustering the men to find supplies and rations. He caught Dick Winters's shuttered gaze and nodded towards the jeep; looting he could do. It wasn't usually food he was looking for but he knew that this was one way that he could do something more than just watch in dumb horror.   
  
He set his mind to the task, refusing to think of why he was stealing bread from the baker, cheese from the townsfolk. It was safer to just not think at all. Thinking made his fingers clench and his throat burn; he needed Carwood to distract him but they both had more important issues at hand than his. He only stopped the jeep once to purge his stomach on the way back to the camp; he decided not to mention it if Lipton didn't first. He would have rather been driving to Bastogne again than back to Landsberg and the horrible things men could do to each other.    
  
Nixon was surreptitiously waiting for him when he got back. He was pulled aside and the Captain told him that the General and the General's doctor were on their way and would he mind organizing the rationing because, frankly, it was winding Dick tighter than a corkscrew and Nixon was more than a little worried about the stresses on the Battalion Commander. He shrugged, nodded, and accepted the order, even though at this point he wanted nothing more than to kidnap Carwood, because an order was an order and he was first a soldier and second a man. Some days his grip on that second felt too shaky to hold on to.   
  
Again, he set his mind on the action, separating himself from the horror around them because there wasn't anything he could do beyond what they told him to. His stomach dropped as he overheard the General's Doctor talking about the dangers of eating after starving. His mind went blank when he heard Liebgott struggling to tell the camp's survivors that they had to go back behind those chicken wire fences. It was difficult to imagine those gates opening again once they were closed and he could feel his face closing off as he pushed back boney shoulders, sharp elbows, ribs bumpy beneath his fingers. He saw Carwood out of the corner of his eye but he had no warmth to spare the man; all his inner fire was consumed with keeping his psyche protected from the horror that had been this day.   
  
He came back to himself, later, to a gentle hand on his elbow. He started, reaching for his belt knife and bearing the other soldier to the ground. Soft, knowing brown eyes were the first thing he saw after blinking the memories from before his face. He sighed and offered his hand, pulling the First Lieutenant to standing and squeezing those fingers in apology. Lip just grimaced a smile at him, bumped his shoulder, and made sure to call him 'Sparky' at least once while filling him in on all the things he hadn't minded missing, like watching Liebgott struggle against drowning, or listening to Dick, with a cracked voice, telling them that this was far from the only camp Hitler had created. Lipton only called him Sparky while teasing. He didn't mind it too much, if only because it came so rarely from anyone else that it was almost something just between them. That, more than anything, except for the phantom sensation of his fingers curled around Carwood's, grounded him after this day they'd had.   
  
He couldn’t sleep that night, even with Lip a solid,  _real_  warmth in his bunk, because he couldn’t stop smelling it, seeing it, hearing those low, animal moans they hadn't even realised they were making. He was dry heaving what little had been in his stomach when Carwood manage to stumble to his side. Neither of them had words for this. They didn’t try to make it better because they couldn’t. Without a sound Lipton handed him a bottle pilfered from Captain Nixon, from Dick’s footlocker where it had been hidden. He knew that his lover hated alcohol but he had never been more grateful for the burn down the back of his throat than he was that night.   
  
His entire body was shaking as he tried to lie back down. He kept biting his lip until Carwood wrapped those arms around him and they rocked each other into fitful, bloody dreams of ash and skeletons and pink triangles that made his chest hurt once he knew what they meant. He awoke later to feel Lipton shuddering against him, like the man was trying to smother things that burned because they could not be let loose. Cursing under his breath, he held his lover’s face tight to his own chest until he could feel that scream echoing in his bones. Eventually they lay exhausted and silent, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling; his fingers curled protectively around Lipton’s shoulder and Carwood’s tangled in his dog tags.   
  
  
The next morning he was grateful when no one seemed to notice how sleepless they looked. Everyone else looked the same. It was a quiet mess with each of them knowing they should be grateful for the food given but none of them able to stomach it. They were ghosts stumbling through the drills and empty steps. Everything felt pointless because the war was over. It was over in that Hitler was gone but just starting in that not everyone was going home. He knew that from an afternoon fishing through paperwork until his eyes crossed. He stopped when he stumbled upon a familiar name always just a heartbeat from his lips.   
  
The paper was thick beneath his fingertips. He had told Dick that he would stay with the men through whatever the enemy had in store for them, while it was always Carwood he was talking about. He would have thought that Winters would know that about him. He had faith in the Major but then he heard the men talking about their Second Lieutenant being transferred to some cushy office aide job. He heard the men talking and he slipped into the office to confirm or deny.   
  
The ink that spelled ‘away’ was sandpaper beneath the whorls of his thumbprint but he couldn’t stop touching it like he could wear the paper away. Like he could make it stop when he knew he was powerless, helpless. The ink was dry and out of his hands.   
  
The office was silent and still around him. He wanted to break something, to scream at Dick for taking his Lip away. He wanted to demand that Carwood stay. But it was up to the army and even he couldn’t take away a more comfortable position from the man he cared about. Lipton deserved the rest, deserved time away from the front; he just wished that ‘the front’ wasn’t synonymous with where  _he_ was.   
  
He was methodically carving away at the edge of the desk with the knife at his ankle when Lipton found him, took one look at the sawdust on his fingers and shut the door firmly.   
  
“Winters surprised me with it.”   
  
The words were said softly, from a familiar body settling against the table at his elbow. That strong, worn hand was warm through his uniform and he found himself leaning closer before he realised, then he pulled away. He would have to learn to be self-sufficient once more. Lipton was leaving. Fingers tightening in his jacket stopped him from hiding away.   
  
“Ron, stop. I’m not gone. We— I’ll write you and you better write back.” That voice was hoarse and hot against his ear. “If you get yourself killed, I’ll kill you myself.”   
  
He looked at Carwood, then, unable to resist the plea in that voice.   
  
"Ron..."   
  
He knew that voice, was familiar with it soft and stern. He knew it; he would miss it. Carwood wiped at the wetness on his eyelashes with a dirty fingertip and he didn't flinch. He brushed his lips against that palm and handed Lip his heart before shaking his head and clambering to his feet. For the first time he ignored that voice calling his name and left the door open behind him. He didn’t know if he should be grateful or ripped hollow-chested when Lipton failed to follow him.   
  
He was sitting on a picnic table, absently squinting at his dog tags in the sunlight, when Nixon found him.   
  
“Dick didn’t know until Lipton told him,” was all Nixon said, watching with a carefully blank expression. The Captain leant against the table beside him, gaze following the metal birth certificate as it reflected light against his fingers. He lifted his attention slowly, eyeing the other man steadily until Nix told the story of how Lipton had marched right into Dick’s office and demanded that the transfer be rescinded. When Major Winters questioned it, Carwood had met that blue gaze steadily and said, ‘What do you think Ron will do to the men without me?’   
  
He huffed a laugh and let the albatross fall from his hands; suddenly the sun was warm rather than just blinding. He stood, saluted Nixon for daring his temper and reputation to deliver the news and headed to his own commandeered office when Nix suggested it. He found Carwood tracing the bites his knife had left. They were wordless as they stared at each other.   
  
“I had to,” Lip said eventually. “You can’t be trusted with your own well-being.” Strong fingers traced over the jagged re-sewn seam in his uniform, invisible to most but not if you knew the story behind it about enemies who sneak up and hold a knife at your throat, thinking that you'll panic and let them kill you without a fight.   
  
He smiled and reached out without thinking to pull Carwood into his arms. He stood for a long moment just breathing in the presence of the man he’d thought he’d lost. The scent of soap, sweat, starch, and Lip was nearly overwhelming and he found himself unable to say all the things he'd intended. Lipton didn’t protest, falling easily into his silence; he could feel the warmth of familiar, beloved hands clutching at him and it went a lot of the way to grounding him. He pulled away slowly, stubble against his palms as he brushed his lips against that mouth he’d never been able to stop watching. Eventually Carwood pushed at him, brown eyes laughing.   
  
“Consider your claim staked,” Lipton assured him with a roll of those eyes; he would have laughed if it hadn’t been true. He stole another before he let himself be pushed away and still they stood together, just resting against each other like they couldn’t stand on their own. He was grateful for Lip's solid shoulders, like strong wings beneath his tired hands. They held each other long enough for the sun to slant in the windows and for Nixon to knock faintly on the door frame before stepping inside to tell them about meetings and mess and those things they still had left to do. He didn't know how they could hide this, bury the reasons why he couldn't let Lipton go but they had to. He had to. Because he just couldn't lose his lover to this hungry war machine.   
  
The next few weeks were a flurry of the army making him jump through hoops to stay and trying to keep his distance so no one discovered the reasons behind Lipton's rescinded transfer. Then he was watching the men playing baseball in the May afternoon, with cut grass in his nose and Dick Winters telling him to go home and take Carwood with him. He met those dark brown eyes, sparkling in the afternoon sun, and grinned so wide Perconte paled and found somewhere else to be. He laughed when Carwood pointed it out and barely resisted the urge to dip his lover for a kiss in the middle of the baseball field. He hardly even cared that the violence he’d grown used to would have to be sewn up tight deep inside because there was no place for it back in America. He had Lipton’s hand warm on his shoulder and Nixon’s home address in his pocket. He figured they’d make do. They had so far.


	4. PART II: In which the war comes home

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PART II: In which the war comes home

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_"Does it hurt?" asked the [Velveteen] Rabbit._

_"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt._

 

**Chapter 4.**  
They came to this little Montana town in 1945, still smarting from the sting of mortar fire, still half-stunned from the concussive forces of the war. He could still remember the soft, gentle look on Carwood's face as they took in the quiet "small town" to the main street, with its General Store and one-screen movie theatre. Here the closest thing to a gunshot was a car misfiring and their driveway was the longest off a dirt back road. He liked the space and after a long three months of half-asleep patrols because it being too quiet meant someone was up to something, he came to appreciate the solitude. It helped to watch the ease with which Lipton settled into everything.

  
Their second week the Second Lieutenant got them invited to the neighbours' for corn hash and a meatloaf that would "melt in your mouth," according to Jim Daly, their other neighbour, whom he met under duress and was almost disgusted to find that he could stand. Jim reminded him of Dick Winters and, of all of Easy excluding Carwood, Nix, and foot-in-your-mouth Webster, competent, confident Dick Winters had been his favourite. It was the way nothing but Nixon ever seemed to phase the Major.  
  
He spent the first month reading books from the library about fixing leaky roofs and kitchen sinks not only because he had the time but because he wasn't sure that he trusted anyone else into their home. It was bad enough that Lipton kept getting them invited into other people's houses like they were easily defensible without scouting first, but he flat-out refused not to try to fix up the house they had bought together. Lipton just smiled at him and handed him the first aid kit when he came in limping, the buckets when it started raining. He grumbled to himself but it made him almost more proud to patch a leaky shingle than to take out an enemy machine gun nest. It was certainly easier to wash out of his fatigues.  
  
They were on their third week in the house when Carwood handed him a pair of brown slacks. He looked at them, using that moment to just take in the soft flannel across Carwood's broad shoulders, the worn weave hugging those thighs.  
  
"Just think about it," Carwood said, smiling that smile and wandering off to get breakfast started. He watched after his lover for a long moment before looking down at the dark fabric coarse between his fingers. He set it carefully aside and laced his boots over his fatigues to climb back up on the roof. He was well aware of Lipton's eyes on him as he walked through the kitchen, pausing only for a cup of coffee and a kiss. It took him a week and a half of those slacks watching him tauntingly from the end of the bed, the chair, the drawer, before he conceded and tried them on. They fit well enough but he liked better the way Carwood looked at him. And he liked the way they looked lying next to Carwood's on the rug in the middle of the afternoon. It made him remember what it had been like to step into this house before it was theirs.  
  
  
Skipping the broken front porch step, he had followed the real estate agent and his lover inside, just in time to hear Carwood breathe, "I love it," obviously seeing something more than worn floorboards, a rusted hot water heater, and a roof more hole than shingle. He had nearly said ‘No’ when the papers were in front of him but Carwood was smiling at him. It was that smile, his favourite smile, the one that promised things about a house and a home and something forever between them. He liked that smile. He settled instead for glaring at the real estate agent for getting Lipton so enamoured with something already so broken. He wasn't sure he liked what that said about Carwood's tendency to take in strays.  
  
The agent had pulled him aside into a living room with dusty drapes and tired wallpaper that smelled of mothballs and a life lived, to tell him that the bones of the house, at least, were solid. He stared at the man without comment before turning back to where Carwood was happily searching through kitchen cupboards. He had stood a silent sentry, watching Lipton signing the papers without a flourish. He swallowed the urge to link their fingers or sign the papers himself; it was a struggle to remember that he was merely renting a room; to avoid the inevitable, inescapable questions, he could never be a co-owner. It had been a sign of how deep into home decor Carwood already was that the man had failed to remark on his downturned heart. He had watched his lover staring at their unfamiliar threshold, countertops, doorframe, in shining wonder. Seeing that look on Carwood's war-weary face everyday, he had a feeling that he could come to love this place.  
  
  
On the first night in their new home, with the war still fresh in their dreams, neither of them had slept. Between the silence of the countryside and the cacophony of a new building falling apart around them, they couldn't rest. He sat propped against the headboard with Lipton wide-eyed at his side. He almost couldn't hear the coyote howl outside over Carwood's plans for the garden out back. He found himself promising long afternoons under the young willow tree just to feel the smile in his Lip's voice, the warm palm that curled over his thigh. He could smell the crushed grass whenever he closed his eyes.  
  
It turned out that he came to crave those afternoons almost more than Carwood did, enjoying the stillness of time spent with his head pillowed in Lip's lap as the world passed by without them. He found himself talking, some afternoons under that tree, telling Carwood things he never would have imagined confessing, about how it feels to _watch_ , to _want_  a man in your command, to know that all the ways you want to approach and touch are wrong not only because you're a superior officer but because of what will happen if you're caught. The army was not forgiving about what he ached for. He hated that Carwood was so familiar with that fear of being discovered, of being found out; he hated that the fear, while diminished, would never truly go away.  
  
He told Lipton about Dog Company. How he could never seem to go a day without throwing up, how no one seemed to notice. How things changed in Easy because after that first time when Lipton steadied his shaking shoulders, such bouts of weakness were few and far between. How much stronger he felt in Easy.  
  
He told Lipton what it felt like to kill a man with your bare hands. About how it was easier to be feared than hated, and how he had never set out to love Carwood, this boy from Huntington, West Virginia, who took care of Easy like the mother it had never had. Lipton was the one that he told the truth behind the rumours —that it had been 6 German POWs and the last seven cigarettes; that afterwards he hadn't been able to smoke for a very long time without shaking. He told his lover about his first jump and how goddamn _scary_  it was to fall into a German nest alone in the dark. How it had taken him a minute to realise that he had lost his gun, and a day to really miss it. He told Carwood that no one started rumours about the things that there  _should_  have been rumours about because no one survived those days. He told Lipton how he still couldn't stop himself from checking the mail everyday, still waiting for a letter from his mama; he would have told anyone else that he'd stopped waiting years ago.  
  
It was about a month and a half later that Carwood handed him a letter that smelled like he had always imagined it would. It was still warm from the walk inside from the mailbox at the end of the driveway and from Carwood's callused fingers. Lip didn’t seem to notice that his hands were shaking; it took him four tries to get the letter open and he needed a bandage for the flesh he’d nicked with his knife. He looked at Carwood only once before landing in the kitchen chair and smoothing the wrinkled white square on the table top.  
  
He stared at the unfamiliar handwriting for long enough that he began to remember the curves and lines of it like he could still picture inside birthday cards and on a note in his lunch pail on that first, nervous day of school. His fingers fluttered over his own name, uncertain. He knew what he was hoping for, he was just afraid of what was true.  
  
A warm hand suddenly solid on his shoulder made him startle and blink, reaching up to twine their fingers without having to think. His eyes scanned the paper before finding Carwood's name on a scrap folded and tucked into a corner of the envelope. He handed it over without a word and reread his own missive as Lipton sat in the chair opposite. He watched a broad smile appear and took a moment to enjoy it before raising an inquiring eyebrow. Lipton gave a headshake and told him that it was a surprise. When he came home a week later to a smell straight from his faded, touch-worn memories, he couldn't move from the kitchen doorway.  
  
He was still standing there, immobile and immovable when his Lip turned around and he couldn't keep himself from laughing. He fell against the door jamb and gasped for breath. He could tell when Carwood gave up on being embarrassed because his partner shook that head and twirled, showing off a hideously patterned apron that must have been left behind with the house because he was certain Carwood had better taste in kitchen-wear.  
  
His breathing was still blissfully ragged when the baker crept closer than most could or would and slipped a still-warm cookie between slack lips. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, swallowed, and kissed Carwood just for trying. It wasn't perfect or even very close but he could taste the love and effort just as easily as he'd always been able to and that's what sparked his sweetest memories of both bakers.  
  
He knew he could get fat from eating Carwood's attempts to match his mother's recipe but he told the man, _his_  man, that he loved this new version just as much. He could easily get used to watching Carwood dance around the kitchen with a bowl of batter rather than dodging grenade shells. It was almost more satisfying just to know that his mother would respond if he sent those letters he'd never written down, and that Carwood had cared enough to contact her first, for him.  
  
  
It was a few months after moving into their wood-and-the-nails-holding-it-together home that he found himself in the middle of the grocery store pushing the cart while Lipton hummed softly, examining a can of kidney beans. He was surprised by how routine this had become without him even noticing. He still eyed the woman over by the frozen peas suspiciously, but that was more because she kept looking at Carwood's ass than anything else, although he did still flinch when a stack of cans the next aisle over hit the floor like gunfire. Lipton gave him a calm look, like his partner hadn't been looking just as frantically to find the enemy. He glared at the man currently debating the merits of Spam in a round can and Spam in a rectangular can; if he didn't know better he'd think Carwood was being this domestic on purpose. It wasn't until he was dutifully following along and they ran into one of the townspeople whom Lip was apparently acquainted with, that he started to wonder what people thought when they were out. He never touched Carwood but he was aware of watching; he liked to know exactly where the man was. They got into more trouble separated than together.  
  
"Right, Ron?"  
  
He blinked, looking at the man he was fixing a house for. He raised an eyebrow questioningly and Carwood repeated the question patiently.  
  
"I was just telling Mrs. Spencer that you've been working very hard on getting the roof fixed up."  
  
He nodded, looking at the woman in question. She smiled at him and he looked at her until the expression began to slip and Carwood stepped on his toes. Then Carwood was making plans for them to do some yard work around the Spencer place while her husband was in the hospital; he didn't bother complaining because he knew he would do what Carwood asked of him.  
  
Later, after the groceries were put away and he was on the porch with an iced tea in his hand because Lipton didn't like alcohol, he looked over at his lover of a million years and smiled. Carwood smiled back, leaned over, and kissed him, which made the day better, as far as he was concerned. He was breathless when Carwood pulled away, leaning against his chest so that they could both hear his heartbeat. He smoothed his hand over the warm curve of that familiar shoulder and sighed, feeling strangely at peace with the world, for all the things he still didn't like.  
  
Later, balancing on the very edge of a plastic-covered paisley couch like it might try to chew on him, he glared vaguely in the direction of Lipton looking over the pictures on the mantel. He fully blamed that man for this travesty in corduroy he was trying not to sink into. He had better things to do with his weekend afternoons than let some random woman from town play hostess. They always had inquisitive, biting eyes, and watched him so closely, waiting for some sign that he was interested in what they always offered and he never wanted. They put him on edge, worrying him that this Mrs Spencer, with her husband still in the hospital and her chores to be done around the yard, would see something in him when he looked at Carwood; that she would recognize what he couldn't let her recognize.  
  
“So, Mr. Speirs,” she said and it took him a heartbeat to realize that she was speaking to him.  
  
He kept expecting people to call him Captain, or at least Speirs, like Carwood still did from time to time. Mr. Speirs had always been his father; the name fit like a poorly made uniform —that was to say, not at all.  
  
“—Are you married?”  
  
He looked at her for a lengthy second, vaguely uncomfortable because he didn’t know what Carwood wanted him to say. He determinately did not look over at Carwood, for all that he wanted to. He shook his head instead of saying anything and looked out the window. Although, thinking of their trip to the supermarket and the “Speirs To Do” list in Carwood’s handwriting on the fridge, he thought maybe he was married and no one had thought to tell him. When a moment passed and he dared to glance over, Carwood was watching him with one of the few expressions he had trouble deciphering. It made him want to twist in his seat but he settled for watching their hostess until she grew uncomfortable enough to flee to the kitchen. Then he turned his hairy eyeball to Lipton and watched the man for any signs of cracking.  
  
“It’s fine,” Carwood told him later, like he had been lingering over it since refreshments were served.  
  
He hadn’t been. It wasn’t until they’d left that it occurred to him to be concerned. He looked at his housemate and lover steadily like he was trying to decode enemy transmissions again.  
  
"Really,” Carwood promised, kissing him. He figured in that case, it must be. "I think she was hoping she could interest you in one of her girlfriends.” He stared at Carwood, not understanding how anyone but the man before him could be incited to care for him in any sort of romantic capacity; and even then it was often still a mystery. “Of course, she doesn’t know you like I do,” Lipton was grinning, dropping down to settle comfortably in his lap. “Or, she better not.”  
  
“Got you,” he said, like that was all the explanation he needed and Carwood smiled at him like it was. He got another kiss as a reward for exploring his romantic side and they retired to the bedroom early enough for the sunset to paint shades of purple and fire on the outside of their curtains.  
  
  
But there was a very large divide between what they knew they felt for each other and what they could afford to show to their neighbours, the towns people, their family, their friends. It ate at him and when it was a starving madbeast, he found himself sitting in the living room with his feet propped up, the radio on, and a book unread in his lap, waiting for the front door to open.  
  
He had told himself while sitting through a lonely dinner, that he wouldn't wait up. He wouldn't sit in the dark like a housewife waiting for her cheating husband because it wasn't cheating if he'd told Carwood to go. His lover hadn't wanted to, had vehemently protested against the plan. He'd wanted to shoot it down himself but he could see how their neighbours were starting to whisper. He was too familiar with whispers. He wasn't about to let them infiltrate the life they'd made here. He wasn't about to let their status as 'dirty homosexuals' become commonly known, not if one date with a woman now and then could help ease them into perpetual bachelorhood. But it didn't mean that he could stand the thought that someone else was touching his Carwood, someone else was making his beloved laugh, seeing the way joy always made those crow's feet deeper. He couldn't stand waiting at home. He couldn't stand waiting alone.  
  
He shuddered, eyes resolutely focused on his unread paperback like they had been for the past two hours, even after it became too dark to read. He looked up at the sound of feet stopping at the doorway, after the door opened. His heart clenched at the sight of that familiar body silhouetted in the kitchen light and he swallowed the urge to demand that Carwood stay at home with him until this world ended and fuck anyone who couldn't handle it. But he didn't have the right, couldn't face the idea of any of the whispers coming back to hurt his Lip. He wouldn't forgive himself if he was responsible for losing his partner hard-won friendships.  
  
"I missed you," was the first thing Carwood said after coming to stand before him. He exhaled loudly and reached a shaking hand to clutch at his lover.  
  
"I love you."  
  
He said it, Carwood said it, they both said it until their words overlapped and bled into the wallpaper. He awoke the next morning with a crick in his neck, aches from the living room floorboards, and Carwood wrapped around him. He was glad he'd dropped the shades last night before the front door had opened.  
  
They spent the day with the door closed and the curtains pulled. He startled them both by dropping the mustard on the kitchen floor and being unable to cut the ham for their sandwiches because his hands were shaking.  
  
"Next time you're going," Carwood told him, eyes dark even as those hands held his still. He shook his head and looked away. He couldn't and he told Lip that. He had his rifle club and drinks out with 'the boys' every other Friday. No one seemed to wonder about him anymore because he saw women with his job and the boys were always ribbing him about all the ones watching him. He held Carwood's hand against his face and tried to explain to his partner about the kinds of things that no one talks about, about how coming home every night to your best friend isn't good enough when he's not a woman. He wanted nothing more than to wrap Carwood up in the sheets that smelled of them and lock the door until the world hung but he couldn't. And he couldn't take those sad eyes watching him so he kissed those lips until they were both exhausted and wordless and willing to write off one more day. He knew he should ask about the date, should ask if she had touched before he staked his claim but it was all his, so far as he was concerned. There was nothing _Carwood_ that didn't set his heart alight. He knew he would never get tired of that body, that man. But a not-so-small part of him was a little afraid of hearing how the date had gone. He had never really lost the fear that he would wake up and lose this.  
  
The next day after work Carwood cornered him on the back porch, away from their neighbours' eyes. He felt the frisson of adrenaline he always got for the nearly public setting but then Carwood was settling onto his lap and that mouth was skating across his stubbled jaw. He shivered and tried to listen to the words being breathed against his skin.  
  
"All I could think about was you. I wished it could have been you." He swallowed his own wishes and resisted the urge to kiss Carwood until those words were gone again. "I'm not going to see her again." Sitting back, Carwood met his unsteady gaze. "Yes, she invited me inside. No, I didn't go. But I... I kissed her goodnight."  
  
He flinched like the words were a ricochet. He didn't look back even after Lip tilted his face up. "All I could think of was you. But she was such a sweet girl and I was using her... Please don't be mad, Ron. Please." He shook his head, unsure how to explain that bewildered and afraid don't always translate to anger.  
  
With a deep breath that tasted like the bile in the back of his throat, he grimaced a smile at his lover and curled his fingers around the dogtags that neither of them could seem to take off. He wore his lover's under his shirt to feel the emboss of Carwood's name against his skin like the band of the wedding rings they couldn't wear. With trembling fingers he found the shape of them beneath Carwood's dress shirt from the office and pressed with his palm. He felt like if he held on hard enough, he could seal them together. "I love you," Carwood whispered again and he nodded because he hadn't started to doubt that. That would hit later, when he awoke to dreams of an empty house, sheets that only smell of laundry soap, and a lawn that he never remembered to cut because there was no one there to tell him to.  
  
He knew they would have to do this from time to time, probably even both of them although the very idea made his stomach drop, but he hoped that their neighbours' curiosity could be pushed aside for a while. He didn't think he could go through this again any time soon. For days afterwards his fingers would tremble whenever his mind wandered and his nightmares returned. He was tempted to sleep on the couch when the circles were darkening beneath Lip's eyes but his love just pulled him back to bed and held on until the world stopped holding quite so many shadows. He tried to do the same for Lip but all he could manage was instinctively glaring at any woman who wandered close and that would make any dates Lip went on useless. Instead he settled for trying to make every second count behind the closed curtains of their home. He did his best to make Carwood forget that there was a world out there that might just hurt them beyond repair.  
  
  
It always surprised him when women would ambush him in the supermarket or the hardware store or the post office or on the street. Lipton said it was because he was handsome, reasonably well-groomed, and had a good job working for and learning from the town's carpenter, Jerry Auerbach. The veteran part didn’t hurt either. Lip told him so one afternoon, with the sun sneaking across the dust and the floorboards, that war scars were sexy and mysterious as those calloused fingers scraped down a damaged shoulder. He wasn't at all sure they were talking about the scars on the outside but he didn't see how those cracks on the inside were worth advertising. He just figured that Carwood was confusing the issue. He never saw women do the same to his Lip; they seemed more inclined to trade brownie recipes and house cleaning tips but at the same time he knew he was instinctively glaring at anyone who came close to his C. Carwood Lipton. Maybe they did it when Carwood went to town alone. He frowned at the idea and the woman who had ventured closest to him squeaked and hurried away; he wondered if he could get away with following Carwood around any more than he already did. Judging by the way the man had firmly shoved him towards the hardware store on the way to the bakery, he imagined not. But sometimes it was difficult to remember that there weren’t Germans waiting behind the next corner to ambush them. Or how unlikely it was that he would lose Carwood to someone else. He could still remember when he'd managed to tell Carwood how much he loved the man. Lip had blinked, cupped his cheek, and he'd almost been afraid that he wouldn't hear it back before those arms were tight around him and that mouth pressed tight to his ear in a hoarse, breathless whisper, "I love you, Ron. Always." He'd returned the sentiment without pause, knowing that he would always want to wake up to that absurd bedhead, go to bed with those icy toes, spend long evenings bickering over the best way to barbecue.  
  
He was jarred back to the street outside the bakery when yet another woman dropped some portion of her groceries right beside him. He sighed beneath his breath like Carwood had taught him and bent down to help, like his Mama had. When the woman tried to talk to him, he stared at her until she gave up. He turned to see Carwood smirking at him and nearly turned away without helping the man with their load of baked goods. He compromised with himself by only taking one of the more ungainly package, plus the smaller one, and ignoring the knowing smirk it got him. He walked off like they weren’t both headed in the same direction. Of course, Carwood wasn’t ready to give up the golden opportunity to tease him, but he was grateful for the respite, however brief it turned out to be.  
  
“Never thought I’d see the day that people were clambering for your company,” Carwood ragged, slipping a loaf into the breadbox.  
  
He couldn’t stop a flinch as he dropped his armful on the kitchen table and let the screen door slam shut behind him. He stood for barely a heartbeat staring angrily at the setting sun before there was a soft tread behind him and a palm warm on the small of his back, the scent of shared aftershave over his shoulder.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Carwood whispered into the space between them. “I didn’t know it bothered you.” He shrugged like he knew it shouldn’t but by then Lipton was shaking his head and slipping closer. “I’ve never been afraid of you,” Lipton said, laying a soft kiss to the curve of his stubbled jaw. He smiled against his will and asked himself how the past could really matter when he had this man now.  
  
  
Sometimes he dreamt of mortar fire and woke looking for his gun. The particular model had changed whenever he got the chance for a new toy but there had always been a weapon beside him. Now there was a Lipton, watching him in the half-light of the quarter moon as his shaking hands tried to light match after match until he cursed and threw the book of them away.  
  
Without a word, rumpled from the kind of dreams they both wished it was possible to share, Carwood picked up the Lucky Strikes and lit one with a deep breath. He pried the lit stick from his lover’s mouth before the man could draw another lungful, and claimed it. Carwood just smiled that smile and leant against his back as he watched the sun crawl over the horizon. He was about to find his pants and start the coffee when Carwood murmured something about Sundays being a day of rest and tugged him back to the sheets that smelled so sweetly of them both. He knew he should be worrying about their broken shingles and the rain clouds coming over the trees but he couldn’t when Lipton was looking at him just like that.  
  
When they surfaced later, it was to day old coffee that still wasn’t as strong as he liked but plenty strong enough for Carwood, and a note from their nearest single female neighbour about some life-halting disaster or another that there was just no way she could fix on her own and would he mind terribly coming over this afternoon? He raised his eyebrow at the promise of baked goods and ignored Carwood’s laughing insistence that he was _not_  allowed to skive off, if only for the bundt cake. He would have rather eaten store-bought cake or more of Lip's with-added-eggshells-cookies if it meant he didn’t have to go but he wasn’t ready to face Lipton’s smug eyes all day, not after the morning had gone so pleasantly.  
  
The woman —"Susan," Carwood told him, straightening his collar with a familiarity that made him grin for a number of reasons— was dressed in a pleasant, light summer dress and gave him an iced tea on the porch before she would tell him what the problem was. He didn't see what was so life-ending about a plugged sink, but he had never really understood why no one but Carwood, Winters, or Nixon would share a cigarette with him either, so he let it go. Carwood was always telling him that other people have different priorities.  
  
The woman —" _Susan_ , you have to call her Susan."— hovered as he wormed underneath the sink. Taking a moment, he tried to picture the pages of a borrowed book that told him what this was all supposed to look like. He nearly swore aloud when she tried the water without warning him and he got soaked from the bellybutton up, but Lipton had been harping on him lately to curb his tongue, so he didn't curse. He settled for glaring at her instead and ran fingers through his hair to brush it off his face. He kept meaning to get it cut but then Lip would distract him whenever he mentioned it, grabbing a handful to kiss him. When he caught this lonely, blatant woman staring at his chest as defined by a wet white t-shirt, he made a note not to tell Lipton; the man's smug looks were sometimes too much. He felt uncomfortable enough with this.  
  
She gave him a bundt cake after he refused an invitation to stay for dinner and he pretended he didn't feel her gaze on his ass as he left. The evening was turning out to be vaguely pleasant in temperature the further away he got and he whistled under his breath as he walked. Lip was on the front porch grinning like he'd been missed when he rounded the kink in their driveway. He groused but didn't bother resisting the urge to return the wave his lover gave him. It was nearly worth the afternoon he'd had to see Carwood looking so happy in the setting sun. Those eyes tracking across his still-damp chest didn't hurt either.  
  
When Lip smugly asked if it had rained on the way back, he glared, but still allowed himself to be drawn into a kiss just inside the door. Later, safely on the back porch with another, sweeter tea in his hand and a Lipton in his lap, he watched as yet again Carwood enjoyed his discomfiture. He raised an eyebrow as his lover's chuckles calmed.  
  
"That's not going to get old," Carwood grinned, kissing him as if this were a forgivable offense. He settled for grumbling and demanding more kisses in lieu of his preferred, more violent retribution. Lip kept telling him that he wasn't allowed to hurt people anymore. Sometimes he couldn't help but be surprised by how easily his lover had shed the war. Then something would bring it back for one or both of them and he was left wishing he could make it better, wishing that violence _could_ be the solution because violence he was good at.  
  
  
It was a Thursday and they were picking up supplies for the weekend, as they had the week before and they would the week after. Like a moment of perfect stillness before an enemy artillery attack, he knew they were in trouble when the door opened and the group wandered into the grocery. His spine stiffened and out of the corner of his eye he could see Carwood start to reach for him. He never got to find out if it was encouragement or to head him off before those troublemakers spotted them.  
  
“Hey queers,” came the snarl and he felt Carwood flinch at his elbow. He glared at the speaker and felt slightly better when the asshole couldn’t hold his gaze, but by then there was a “buddy” at his back and he could practically hear the manly cracking of knuckles.  
  
He and Carwood had drawn their fair share of these kinds of looks when they had become so close in Easy. But having a CO like Dick Winters helped. Dick didn’t put up with a lot. _He_  put up with a lot less and it really only took one man pulling an all night patrol after “accidentally” having been overheard bad-mouthing his Second Lieutenant. The rest of them had smartened up and shut up. He wasn’t blind to the other close friendships that sprang up throughout Easy. He could see it in the way they looked at each other. He looked at Lipton the same way—awe, adoration, and a fear that none of it would last beyond the foxholes and the trenches, where men drew together but could too easily be torn apart. Eventually they all stopped noticing in each other what was so desperate within themselves but he had never forgotten those early looks and angry words. He saw the same here but this time he had no weapons and a Lipton to protect from such small-mindedness.  
  
“We don’t want any trouble,” Carwood was saying, ever his little peacemaker.  
  
“Shut up, faggot,” the leader sneered and he burst into action before any of them could react. Within a heartbeat he was kneeling over the prostrated jerk, his fist cocked for another blow to add to the smear of blood on the floor.  
  
“Don’t speak to him like that,” he hissed, meeting the coward’s eye with anger in his own. For an instant he was back on the battlefield with dead bodies and loose bowels but then he realised that the punk had pissed himself and it was Carwood’s hand warm on his shoulder, trying to pull him off. He snarled again, enjoying the flinch, and reluctantly climbed to his feet.  
  
He looked to Lipton first, seeing the quiet resignation in those soft brown eyes, tempered only by shadows of that same awe and adoration from his own. Then he looked to the gathering crowd, the shop owner among them. His eyes narrowed when Lipton apologized for the trouble and offered to pay for the damages. At Lip’s quiet, tired words he noticed the Chip’s Ahoy bag still crumpled beneath the asshole’s body, the bread loaf in pieces down the aisle.  
  
“No, no,” the grocery owner—“Call me Jackson, please”—said, waving a hand with a glare for the hooligans. “I saw them start it. Ron was just heading off a real fight."  
  
He couldn't stop staring at the man, Carwood's hand still warm on his arm, sure that there had to be a catch, like the man hadn’t realised everything those little bastards had said was true. He was everything they could say about him; he hadn’t survived D-Day, Haganeau, and Bastogne not to be able to face the rumours within him. He loved C. Carwood Lipton and he failed to see how that should be anyone’s business but Carwood’s.  
  
“Thank you,” the Lipton in question was saying, pulling on his arm to get his attention. He followed, docile, as they gathered their groceries and paid without another look for the eyes following them. He was proud of Carwood for the steady gaze fixed on their cashier, for the way those soft, _strong_ hands refused to flinch or shake.  
  
Partway through the whole process, he gave in to the urge to brush the back of his hand against Lipton, under guise of reaching for a bag of groceries. He liked the way the touch made his partner exhale softly and lean into him ever so slightly, and he liked the way this time his glare made those jerks grimace and look away. He made a mental note that they looked familiar and knew that if there was any further trouble, he would know who to look for. He knew that Lipton wouldn’t approve of any action that wasn’t going to the police but he also knew that the police likely wouldn’t care about them and theirs. He'd seen it before, even if he'd never told Carwood.  
  
Besides, it had been too long since he had felt the thrum that comes from the _fight_ of _fight or flight_. It made him want to take Carwood then and there but he managed to restrain himself until the groceries were melting and otherwise spoiling in puddles on the countertop before hauling Lipton hard against his body with the express purpose of feeling that skin strum beneath his fingertips. He grinned when Lip ripped his shirt, pulling it over his head.  
  
When Carwood was babbling in his ear, scrambling for a grip on the kitchen tiles, he just grunted and pushed all the harder. He liked the way it felt when his lover came apart in his arms, gasping and arching. He kissed his love until their hearts slowed; he stayed in place until Carwood’s fingers slipped, exhausted, from curling through his hair. He didn’t move until Lipton pushed him off with a muffled curse for the groceries. He laughed, then, because of the way insincere anger and afterglow made those brown eyes shine.  
  
He stayed closer for the next few weeks. He got knowing looks from Carwood, from the grocery store owner, the ladies in the bakery. But when Lipton failed to verbally protest, he knew that their encounter had shaken the other man more than even he had realised. He took a long moment, one afternoon afterwards, to realise that, as with a lot of their life, they had just gravitated together without the need for any prolonged conversations on the subject. It had just been one morning, sharing a cigarette in the pre-dawn, that he had looked at Carwood, leaned over and kissed him. It wasn’t their first kiss but it was one of the sweetest.  
  
He was surprised to find that for all he could rarely find the words, he wanted to hear them from Carwood. He didn’t really want to learn about his lover’s previous experience; he didn’t like the idea of anyone else touching his Carwood but it was easy to see how much the man needed to talk about this. How much it obviously still hurt.  
  
He fixed Lipton with an inquisitive look on the porch one night as the sun set in reds and purples in front of them. He had one hand on an ice tea and the other on Carwood. When his lover closed those eyes and huffed a sigh, he didn’t smile, although he wanted to, but leaned closer with his mouth closed.  
  
“It was high school,” Carwood whispered, that voice a hot, hoarse breath against his face. “There was this boy I just couldn’t help watching. We got… close.” He fought the urge to growl and Carwood fixed him with that fond, indulgent look just as if he had. “Not _that_  close, Ron,” his lover assured him. “But close. I thought maybe…”  
  
Lip looked away, then, like even he was reminder enough to bring pain. He was still silent as he squeezed the hand he held, debating for a moment if he should pull Carwood in closer or if that would be too much for them both while listening to this.  
  
“I should have realised…” Carwood refused to look at him and he found himself adrift without being able to see those dark, expressive eyes. “My brother found out,” Lipton told their clasped hands. “He refused to talk to me for a whole month, after yelling about it until my mom talked him into thinking that it was just a phase. He never looked at me the same way.”  
  
He gave into his instincts and shuffled them both onto the porch swing; there he could tuck Lip against his side where they were both safer.  
  
“He died a couple months after I told him I’d signed up for the paratroopers. He said that they would never let a– a sissy jump.”  
  
His gut burned as Carwood turned a damp face towards him. He wanted revenge on the bastard who had hurt his Lip. He wondered if Easy's Doc Roe knew any voodoo practitioners in New Orleans before turning his attention back to the sad man in his arms. As he lay a soft kiss to Carwood’s crown, a part of him was composing a letter to Eugene Roe. The rest of him was wrapped up in his lover on a porch swing in the middle of Montana because, despite the kink rapidly forming in his back, there was no other place he could think of to be. No one else to share it with.  
  
He spent the rest of that afternoon with his arms around his beloved, attempting to soothe a decade's old ache that would likely never heal. But it didn't mean he couldn't try and he wasn't above making a fool of himself to make Carwood smile; a double-helping of flour on his own head and one frilly apron on his chest were proof enough of that. He considered it all worth the effort when Lip gave him a headshake and smiled at him, shocked into laughter when he added a handful of dry mix to the effort. In the end, he didn't have enough left to make the comfort-cookies he'd intended and Carwood made him clean beneath the fridge all on his own since apparently it was "all his fault" but he knew he'd do it over again if it got him that warm, besotted smile. He could live on that smile.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5.**   
When Lipton first brought up Easy's five-year reunion, he shook his head and changed the channel on the TV, which should have meant ‘No.’ So when Carwood asked him his tie size, he thought nothing of answering. But when he was told to pack a bag, he started to wonder. He raised a steady eyebrow at his lover and it wasn't long before Carwood flashed the accepted invitation at him. He blinked for a minute before walking out to the back porch.   
  
"If you don't go, they'll ask after you."   
  
He raised an eyebrow and Lipton shrugged.   
  
"Dick asked about you in his letter last week. I'm sure Nixon and Webster would love to hear more looting stories."   
  
He couldn't stop a half grin; it had been fun, even if most of his treasures had been lost in the mail and Carwood had made him give up the rest. Lip stepped up against his back, hooking a chin over his shoulder.   
  
"And I don't want to be without you for the weekend. I've gotten used to you."   
  
His grin widened as he turned to face his lover, cocking an eyebrow smugly.   
  
"Besides," Carwood returned mischievously, eyes twinkling in a way that made him nervous, "Do you  _really_  want to make me stay the weekend with only Luz for company?"   
  
His hands tightened on Carwood's hips and his gaze narrowed. He'd seen Luz's eyes wander more times than he was comfortable with and he knew how irresistible Carwood could be without even trying. That body was infinitely touchable in a dress uniform.   
  
"So are you going to pack now?"   
  
He grumbled under his breath and stole a hard kiss before shoving Lipton back and stalking into the house to repack what Carwood had chosen for him.   
  
  
As they walked in the hotel doors after entirely too much time spent travelling and a sticky nametag on Carwood's chest that he refused to copy, he felt more than saw Lipton smile and a part of him relaxed like this could have been difficult. Still, it was strange to see them again, these soldiers, these men. It made him miss his gun and his helmet. Lipton stayed beside him and he fought the urge to dip the man for a kiss in front of the Company, so Luz would stop making eyes and they'd both have an excuse to make an early night of it. As if knowing what he was thinking, Carwood pinched him and lead him to the buffet. The drive had made them late enough that dinner had already started. He was almost grateful for the respite from small talk, since he still hadn't learned the knack, for all that he was better at faking it now.   
  
"Speirs, sir. How have you been? I didn't expect to see you here."   
  
He looked up from a Carwood-approved plate half-filled with vegetables to see David Webster lingering at their table-edge. The man looked at him with an expression partly alcohol bravery, partly pure Webster — nervous adrenaline. His mouth quirked and he inclined his head, watching David find a seat.   
  
"So... You've been well?"   
  
He nodded, glancing at Carwood without thinking, before raising an eyebrow at David.   
  
"Yeah, I've been all right. It's hard sometimes, fitting back into civilian life, you know?"   
  
He nodded and smiled over at Carwood, trying to resist the urge to grab his partner's hand. He smiled wider when he felt a warm palm on his knee beneath the table cloth. They made conversation with Webster, discovering that after drifting for a while upon returning home, David had eventually settled in California, finally writing and ultimately happy. They begged off before long and returned to the room they were sharing as one of the benefits of booking late and having limited choices. He was done with his daily dose of playing nice, after the gas station attendant on the road, the hotel staff, the men of Easy. Carwood took pity on him and hit 'door close' on the elevator before Randleman across the lobby could start in their direction. He kissed Lip for that when the door to their room was closed behind them.   
  
The next few days were a blur of him biting his tongue, resisting the urge to bite Carwood’s, making nice with those men he needed to, and relaxing with Dick Winters on the balcony when it got to be too much. Dick had seen him looking almost mournfully at Lip across the room before grabbing his arm and pulling him outside. His heartbeat picked up, worrying at how lax they'd become in keeping up appearances if Dick Winters had noticed.   
  
“You really do love him.” He raised an eyebrow, surprised that was in question even as he quietly cursed himself for being obvious. His panicked exhale was shaky when Dick only chuckled and shook a grey-brushed head. “I was a little too busy with the war, you know? And I couldn't really  _afford_  to notice, Ron. We needed both of you.”   
  
He shook his head and turned to watch the night’s lights across the river from their vantage point. The Major stood beside him without another word about it. He liked the silence with Winters; it was nearly as comfortable as Carwood’s but he was still grateful when Lip showed up with Nixon in tow. He smiled at his lover and squeezed those strong fingers under cover of night, sure once again that the other men wouldn’t care, if the look between them was any indication. His smile widened when Carwood leant closer and brushed a split-instant kiss against his mouth. He tilted his head inquisitively, enjoying the heat of his lover so close.   
  
“I’m glad you came,” Carwood whispered and his grin turned wicked. “Oh, quit thinking like that.” He liked it when Lipton blushed; he liked it even more when he got another kiss to stop him from saying anything aloud.   
  
If the reunions were going to be more of the same like this, quiet moments with Dick, trading looting stories with Nix, and watching Webster stumble through a dance with his admittedly pretty girlfriend, then he thought he might not put up as much of a fuss when the next one came around, if only to see the surprised happiness on Carwood’s face when he agreed off the bat. Still, he was grateful when the next day marked an end of reminiscing and an hour of goodbyes and Carwood exchanging addresses and telephone numbers with those men they'd lost track of in settling. He watched Luz for wandering hands when his lover hugged the man and surprised himself by pulling Webster into a quick embrace that left the private cherry-red and Carwood beaming. He patted Dick's back, punched Lewis Nixon's shoulder, and bundled Lipton into the car before the wistful farewells could begin all over again.   
  
  
When they returned from the reunion, battle-weary once again just from a drive across the country, there was a message waiting for them in the mailbox. He wanted to ignore it like he had the other three since he’d gone in to the dentist's with an aching tooth and Lipton's hard insistence at his back, but Carwood beat him to it and grabbed the missive before he could crumple it to unintelligible.   
  
He sighed, stalking through the house to throw his duffle by the bedside. He liked how the army green still fit so nicely into the décor like Carwood knew he couldn’t give it all up. He still liked to run in the woods, climb trees and ladders. He liked to go out in the dark, sometimes, patrolling like he needed to just to keep the shadows in his chest quiet for a little while longer. His lover never said a word and he knew he would always be grateful for that, even if he could never find the words to say it. He liked it best when Lip would walk alongside him, footsteps as quiet in the leaves, snow, and spring.   
  
“You’re going to the dentist,” Carwood told him when they ran into each other in the hall-space between the bathroom and the back door. He nodded without saying anything and continued on out to the porch. It was his favourite place in the house, after beneath the wiillow and anywhere Carwood was. He had spent many lonely evenings curled on the bench swing, his fingers tangled in the dogtags around his neck, when Carwood was out keeping the rumourhounds off their trail.   
  
That Monday, in the middle of a rainy afternoon when he would much rather have stayed home tasting the skin behind Lip's knee that never failed to make the man whimper, there was only the slightest of hesitations in his stride as he crossed the threshold. He told himself that this was nothing, that it wasn’t a big deal to let some stranger tilt his head back until he was vulnerable and then try to  _relax_  as the same strange man shoved sharp implements down his throat. That was why he had been dodging the receptionist in town for weeks, why he grabbed a hold of Carwood’s wrist and refused to let go when the man went to leave. Lip took one look at him, clearly able to see the widening of his eyes, the flaring nostrils he couldn’t seem to calm, and took a seat. Lipton just smiled serenely at the torture artist in the white jacket when the man finally wandered back in and didn’t say a word. He was so sickeningly grateful not to be alone in that moment that he tried to unclench his fingers from Carwood’s fragile bones. He nearly smiled around the disturbingly sharp things currently digging into his pink and tender gums when his fingers were squeezed, nestled safely between Carwood’s.   
  
“It’s ok,” Lip soothed, brown eyes soft with adoration and understanding. “I’ve got a couple cavities myself. They don’t hurt.” He raised an incredulous eyebrow and cocked his head toward where Doctor Malpractice had just left; for an instant his discomfort was worth Carwood Lipton’s throaty chuckle and the warm hand on his arm. When the dentist came back but Lip didn’t remove that hand, he made himself a promise to keep an eye on the calendar and go with Lipton when next there was a dental check-up necessary. He wasn’t about to knowingly leave his lover in the hands of this quack without backup. Even if he knew Carwood was more than capable of personal defense.   
  
When they got home, he found himself in the bedroom for a quiet moment. His mouth was still sore and he could remember the scent of anasthetic and his mama’s hands, wiping a cloth over his forehead after a fight had broken three baby teeth into pieces. The dentist had taken out the fragments of bone-shrapnel and his mama had done what she could for the leftover pain, like she always did.   
  
His hands were steady as he unbuttoned the pocket and he could feel soft brown eyes on him as he smoothed his fingertips over the worn, frayed edges of the familiar handkerchief one more time before kissing the patron saint medallion with a brush of lips and wrapping and tucking it back into an inner pocket in his shirt. He turned slowly, reluctantly if it had been towards anyone else, and raised an eyebrow at the lover watching him.   
  
"Nothing," Lipton said quietly, getting off the bed and leaning against him. He shifted towards that familiar aftershave. "You had that in Europe, didn't you?" Carwood asked and he nodded, swallowing all the things he remembered about the inscription that had worn away under younger, dirtier fingers searching for some letters from home.   
  
With shaking hands he fished the threadbare memory from its safety and unwrapped the prize. He couldn't quite bring himself to hand over the stained and faded pocket square but he knew the medal remainder would be safe with his lover. Their fingers brushed and those lips were welcome in a soft, understated kiss against his cheek. He watched Lip examine the chipped, dented surface and found that he was holding his breath without realising. When Carwood brushed another kiss to St. George before holding it out to him, he blinked, curled his fingers through Carwood's around the medallion, and pulled his partner against him. He couldn't stop himself from clinging to the other man but a gentle hand curled around the back of his neck told him that Carwood didn't really mind.   
  
He stayed there until he knew he hands weren't shaking anymore. Then he squeezed those strong fingers in thanks and leant aside to tuck away the luck piece and its worn wrapper. He knew that next time he would hand over both the medallion and the handkerchief without another thought. He could trust this man he loved, even with those fragile pieces that would be impossible to replace.   
  
  
Admittedly, he missed it sometimes, the driving at breakneck speeds, with or without enemy gunfire. They had a beat-up clunker to get to and from but sometimes he did miss the trucks and jeeps they let him drive. It wasn't something he had ever thought to mention, so when Carwood announced one Saturday that they were going out, he paid only enough attention to ascertain if it was a slacks or fatigues type day.   
  
"Your good jeans, Sparky,” Carwood said, with a mischievously happy smirk that made him want to kiss the other man back to bed and spend the afternoon there. He liked his Carwood best when happy, and mischievous was even better. His love tasted sweeter that way.   
  
When they left the house, he followed docilely enough. He liked the way it made Lipton watch him like he was the one up to something. But he took back any half-serious complaint he’d muttered on the drive over when Carwood pulled into the parking lot and he saw the platoon of army green vehicles just waiting for field testing. He stared at his partner in shock and awe; he didn’t understand how this could be possible.   
  
“I may have mentioned your crazy driving to a guy I know named Major Winters, and he might have gotten in touch with the base here,” Carwood said, a grin colouring the words. If they’d been home he would be kissing Carwood by now. He settled for a squeeze to the knee, hidden beneath the dash, before bounding out of the car and towards the new toys. He was vaguely aware of Lipton at his back, talking to some young kid in a uniform. He looked up when his name was called and grinned even wider at the greenhorn’s expression as he snatched the glinting keys from the air.   
  
“Just around the track, Captain,” he heard Lip yelling after him as he clambered into the driver’s seat. He hesitated a second to see if the Second Lieutenant was going to follow, before gunning it.   
  
The obstacle course was easier than any battlefield he’d driven but he still couldn’t stop grinning, dust-covered and shaking from adrenaline, as he squealed to a stop, loudly announcing that she pulled to the left, and clapped Carwood on the shoulder hard enough to stagger the man. If he got any closer than backslapping, he would do one of the many things Carwood told him he wasn’t allowed to do in public. Normally it wasn’t difficult to keep his hands to himself because he knew what the backlash would do to them, would do to  _Carwood_  and he knew why. He never wanted to see that pain in those soft brown eyes again but every now and again, with this energy thrumming through him, it was easy to forget the line. So he stayed a step farther away than he wanted to and held his tongue, although he knew he would never be able to stop watching the way that Carwood sparkled, happy, in the sunlight. He was grateful then that so many of the same things made them happy. He liked the way those crow's feet danced when Carwood was laughing at him.   
  
When the private tossed him another set of keys, he latched onto Carwood’s arm and pulled the protesting man along. As Carwood hesitated to climb into the rusty truck, he glanced at the uniformed kid watching them before pinning Lipton with a look. His palm was hot over the heart of his lover’s shirt and Lipton looked at him steadily for a long moment before nodding and relaxing with a smile. “I know you won’t hurt me.” After that it was easy to persuade his partner into the vehicle. And if he took the corners a little easier this time, and threw an arm across Lipton’s chest to brace that body when he had to slam on the brakes, neither of them was about to mention it.   
  
He couldn’t stop a grin at the ‘Whoop!’ when he pulled his fishtail into a perfect park beside a more-than-slightly terrified private. It had taken a lot of covert practice to work that out. He laughed when the young private tried to avoid gaping at them, and handed over the keys. Now that he knew these toys were here, he fully intended to drag Carwood along every now and again but for now he was ready to be alone with this man who could appreciate —or at least tolerate— every part of him, even those bits that involved mud, gas, and unhealthy amounts of adrenaline.   
  
As he hit the parking break in the truck in front of their still-needing-a-coat-of-paint porch, he fixed his lover with a long look. He was shaking with the urge to lean over for a kiss that was everything he had been holding in for hours.   
  
“You’re welcome,” Carwood smiled at him, squeezing his knee beneath the dashboard. When Lip caught his hand and twined their fingers in the front hallway, he fought to keep what he was sure had to be a dopey grin off his face, and instead found himself promising to paint the porch this weekend, like he hadn’t been promising for a month. Lipton just smiled, shook that head of slowly-growing hair, and handed him a head of lettuce with a wave toward the cutting board. He looked down at the iceberg in his hand but all he could feel was the thrum of gasoline in his veins and the smell of motor oil on his hands. He tossed the leaf vegetable in the general direction of the sink and took a step forward to pin Carwood to the counter. He liked the way the scar on Lip’s jaw was more sensitive to the rasp of his tongue. His lover shuddered in his arms and he huffed a laugh against that neck.   
  
“Not hungry, I take it?” Lipton smirked, looking horribly smug upon turning around and tugging two shirts free from their waistbands. He retaliated by mouthing at Carwood’s collarbone when it was exposed, as enthusiastically as he had ever gnawed sauce from barbecued ribs. When Lipton tried to laugh at him again, he raised his head and sucked on that familiar tongue to still it. He loved to hear his lover laugh but just then, with the echoes of a responsive engine vibrating beneath his fingertips, he was more concerned with hearing  _his_  Car moaning his name. He liked the way that Carwood Lipton purred better than any finely crafted beauty.


	6. Chapter 6

** Chapter 6. **   
When Carwood first brought up the idea of making their house into a "Home for Troubled Boys," he was as resistant as he could be without active sabotage. They'd been in the house long enough to wear the steps to their feet, smooth down the rough patches in the drywall by pushing each other against it in passion. He didn't want to disrupt that. He didn't want to give the neighbours any more reasons to whisper. He didn't want to lose what little time he had to spend with his partner  _as_ his partner.   
  
He didn't want those "troubled boys" coming into their finally calm lives and destroying hard-earned quiet. It wasn't until his lover stopped asking that he found himself considering the idea. He could just see Lip standing on the porch calling everyone in for dinner like it was some worn, familiar domestic routine. He could just imagine the smile on that war-lined face and it made the soppy part of him that only Carwood Lipton got to see, melt a little. When he saw the way Lipton  _wanted_ , he caved. Eventually he gave in and said yes just to watch those eyes still smile at him when he woke them both up with nightmares three mornings in a row and when he got in a fight with the baker for shorting them again. He knew that man had doubts about them; he recognized the gleam in those beady eyes but he didn't have the heart to tell Carwood, to watch those beautiful brown eyes dim in disappointment, to watch Lip get dressed up for another night out with anyone but him.   
  
Carwood brought home miles of paperwork and the kind of red tape he had always hated and still did. They put Lip's name on everything because it was on the deed to the house and because he knew his partner would have a better touch and a better tongue for all the pieces of this. He was just a war-scarred man renting a room from a war-buddy. He tried to keep himself out of it as much as he could besides moral support when it was dark and doubts were stronger than convictions.   
  
As "single" men, they knew better than to attempt adoption —or, Carwood did and he just went along— but with good paychecks and a finally solid roof, they could foster. And if they got the more difficult boys within whom he saw fractured pieces of himself, he wasn't about to say anything if that would threaten Carwood's increasingly domestic mindset. He would play live-in friend and housemate when the investigators and officiators came by. He told himself that his clothes didn't look lonely hanging all by themselves in the guestroom closet. He knew that even a hint of the whispers that flared up like bad weather and Carwood would lose any hope at cobbling together broken people into a family, and a lot more besides. He never told Lip that lying alone in that bed for the week before the officiators came had nearly been worse than Bastogne  and a foxhole he'd been sure he would be buried in. He didn't say it because in the shadows that followed renewed nightmares, he didn't feel sure that Carwood would choose him over this wistful dream.   
  
When they came it was a dark afternoon and he was still sweaty and dusty from a day in the woodshop. He saw the hope in Lip's eyes and forced himself to smile and shake hands without bolting. He'd come home and into the tour midway; next they asked where the boys would sleep and Carwood showed them the bunk beds he'd made at work and put together himself; he smiled at the pride in Carwood's eyes when the investigators nodded and made positive noises. He followed along, a docile shadow as Lipton lead them to the barn and the tire swing that was in the oak, not the willow. He didn't bother listening to Carwood's speech about the nearest schools and how they would trade off working the early shift so that there was always someone there to meet a homeward boy. He'd heard the same speech over breakfast for the past five mornings and that didn't make surreptitious looks any easier as Carwood segued into the parts of the speech about another presence in the home, who'd had his share of trouble in school and out of it. They'd agreed to tell the red tape about his past and how now military school could be a family tradition. But that didn't mean that he had to be happy about being laid bare before these people who would then judge his lover. He surprised himself by how much he wanted both of them to be found worthy of a mark in their favour.   
  
In the end, his silence was the better part of valour but his lemonade wasn't nearly as good as Carwood's. They sat around for an interminable afternoon while he fielded questioning stares at his familiarity with the house and wondered if they were SS trained in their interrogation. He wanted to kick them out when inquiries into their unmarried statuses made Carwood flinch; he knew it was memories tripped of a messy divorce done with an ocean and a war between a husband and a wife, but neither of them really cared much to be reminded. Lipton told them about a few unsuccessful dates and he tricked his tongue into making similar noises. He wanted to run after them and  _make_  them agree when they left with pleasantries enough but Carwood's shoulders still slumped in defeat. He settled for grabbing his partner and hauling the man outside to their willow tree to salvage what was left of a Sunday afternoon.   
  
Carwood watched the mail for weeks afterwards. He left his clothes in the guestroom closet and tried not to think of how pathetic they looked alone. The house was swept and washed to within an inch of its lustre and he found himself, increasingly, finding somewhere else that he needed to be, most afternoons. He wanted to stay and help his partner but sometimes it was too difficult to remember that violence wasn't going to solve this problem. To hold on to the  _Why_ behind his continued nightmares alone in the guestroom.   
  
He stole Lip's favourite lounging shirt one afternoon when he came home first and tried to lie to himself at 0300 hours when his body wouldn't listen to reason. He took to hiding out in his home workshop until his hands were shaking from fatigue and Carwood had given up calling him in for dinner. He came out with a new scar on the back of his hand and a beautifully crafted little wood wagon.   
  
He saved the hand-crafted, meticulously detailed headboard until Carwood gave up waiting and they shared that bed again. They were hesitant and fumbled like it was their first time all over again. He held Lip, sweat cooling to cold on his scalp as his lover's breaths hitched. He didn't say a word when tears made their way down his side to soak into the sheets beneath them. He pressed his lips to Carwood's temple until the man in his arms grew lax and he could let his own breath hitch, mourning the things it seemed like Carwood would never have. The things that could be taken away if he ever moved his clothes from the guestroom closet where they languished.   
  
  
One Saturday morning, still pleasantly rumpled from a late night and sleeping in, he chewed half-heartedly on a dry piece of toast and listen to the rustle of the newspaper across the table. There had been no word as to their hopes and Carwood's dreams but he found his lover relaxing from "fraught" a little day by day. There was still a wistful edge to most of the sighs that echoed through the house but he took it upon himself to be a distraction until the emotion passed. It was worst when they heard the mail truck go by and not stop at the end of their driveway; when the doorbell turned out to be Jim wanting to borrow some flour, and not the culmination of hoops jumped through successfully.   
  
"I think we need to get a dog," Carwood told him, expression entirely too mischievous. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow over the top of his paperback and waited for Lipton to continue. "I hear they're a great way to meet girls," was the response finally made without looking up from the crossword.   
  
He declined to comment beyond a snort, and made sure to bite at Lip's hipbone later on that afternoon to give the man a taste of what some girl wouldn't do. Carwood just smiled at him in that annoyingly content way and threaded warm,  _strong_  fingers through his hair. He would have growled and bitten again but Lipton was still smiling at him and he liked the way that felt.   
  
He saw, over the next couple of weeks, how Carwood's gaze would linger on dogs they passed in the street like a woman gazing at an infant. His lover was forever going up to strange dogs and making a new best friend. He told himself that it didn't bother him but it was difficult to resist the urge to lay a possessive hand on Carwood's back, to not say "We love dogs" and mean it in all the ways you could mean a "We." He couldn't but he  _wanted_  so badly, sometimes, to lay claim on the man. It wore at him, having to lie by omission every time someone asked if there was somebody special in his life.   
  
He knew that in part the dogs were a replacement for the fostering that seemed to have escaped them and that might be why he eventually found himself in discussions with their neighbours down the lane whose mutt had just had a five-pup litter. They seemed surprised when he called on them but one look at the little beasts and he knew that these were the pups for his Lipton.   
  
He spent the afternoon gathering together all the paraphernalia the vet in town told him you needed for a puppy, before he gathered Carwood into the car without admitting where they were headed. The look on his partner's face when Lip saw the pen of puppies in the barn and remembered the backseat full of dog things, was worth all the trouble he'd had in putting this together and all the playing nice he'd had to do, even if he was getting better at it with Carwood's coaching.   
  
They settled on a runt because that's the pup that crawled into Lip's lap liked it belonged there and nuzzled his fingers so sweetly. He couldn't keep from laughing at the little beast stalking Carwood's trailing shoelace across their living room floor later and the look in Lipton's eyes made that okay. The kiss he got that pushed him against their bedroom door, once the pup was dozing with little puppy snores in a doggy bed lined with his second favourite flannel shirt, told him all that he needed about grateful partners and what it's like to do the right thing when given a choice.   
  
Of course, that didn't help when the little monster ate his fuzzy woollen socks because they must have still tasted like sheep, and dug up the garden until he was sure that even C. Carwood Lipton would be tempted to think about withholding love and cuddles. That Carwood just told the puppy "NO" firmly and tapped that tiny wet nose with an index finger surprised him but at the same time it didn't. He should have known that Carwood didn't have the heart to discipline even the most devious of puppies. And if the middle of the night found  _him_  in the middle of the kitchen with a cup of milk in one hand, a puppy in the other, and a turkey sandwich between them, well, that was his business. Who's to say that he hadn't awoken from a nightmare and the little monster hadn't decided to keep him company? That's what he would have told his lover if he'd been asked but Carwood didn't ask, just washed the plate and gave him the soft,  _gentle_  kiss that he got after every nightmare.   
  
  
They settled into life with a nosy, terrorizing puppy. They'd both given up on hearing anything from the fostering system and whenever he saw the sadness in Carwood, he felt guilty for ever wanting their try to fail. In the first few weeks after the visit, when their hope was still new out of the box, he had wanted to stake out the post office but Carwood wouldn't let him. He'd settled for hovering whenever the mail hit the kitchen table to be sorted through. They didn't hear anything until he let down his guard of Carwood, hands deep in a soapy sink as his partner hummed softly and sorted bills from junk from letters with a sleepy puppy resting against a worn, darned sock.   
  
He almost didn't hear the hitch when those fingertips fumbled. He turned in time to see Lip pale with a fat manila envelope crinkled in white knuckles. Neither of them noticed his wet fingers as he guided Carwood to sit and held on as the plain, innocuous envelope stared back.   
  
"What if..."   
  
He shook his head, bussed his lips against Carwood's temple, and wiped his palms on his slacks. His fingers were shaking but the letter opener was dulled enough he got no new scars in using it. He skimmed the contents and saw that it was far enough from disappointment for his Carwood to read, before he handed it over. He waited impatiently as those deep brown eyes took in every word twice; a grin caught him off guard as Carwood cursed creatively and quietly before turning to him for awe-shocked confirmation. He nodded and caught the body thrown at him in a hug. Their laughter was relief and the anticipated fear of screwing up. Below the table, Beau turned over, woke enough to start chewing on a shoelace, and he understood, suddenly, that it had just become a thousand times more important that his clothes keep hanging alone, if they were going to make this work.   
  
He might have been more in the "anticipated fear" group than Carwood's easy laughter but he bit his tongue when his partner asked and made doubly sure the tire swing in the backyard was secure, instead. He knew this wasn't the last of it but days before the skinny, battered body mentioned in the enclosed file turned up on their doorstep was not the time.   
  
  
The first night, following a letter in the mail and a bruised, skittish body in their third bedroom, neither of them slept, like the war had just ended. He found himself stepping over the fourth floorboard that always creaked under his toes and leaning against the doorframe just to watch a bony chest rise and fall. He didn't even blink when a warm hand and a sleepless cheek settled against his back. He smiled, linked their fingers and pulled until both those arms were around him and he could still see the boy sleeping fitfully on store-creased sheets.   
  
Breakfast the next morning was awkward and even Lipton didn't know what to say but the flapjacks were all eaten and, later, the tire swing got a tentative work out. He found himself discussing plans for a tree house but knew that it would have to fit in the oak if it was going to go anywhere because the willow tree was already spoken for.   
  
With an extra pair of inexperienced hands, he managed to get the tree house up in time for fall rains and cold weather. They compromised on waiting for spring to use it by ambushing Lipton with snowballs and building snow forts when the sun was warm. Neither he nor Lip seemed to mind war in winter when it involved snowballs and Alex smiling. Stories of a boy-Carwood pelting a younger brother soothed away any fleeting sense-memories of trench foot and exploding earth for both of them. And if he wanted nothing more than to kiss his love and melt the snowflakes on a handmade cap sent in a care package from his mother, instead he surprised himself by laughing with someone other than Carwood Lipton. Lip, in turn, surprised him by managing the necessary discipline with more aptitude than the aging mutt Beau —who still slept on his damned shirt— would suggest.   
  
  
It was a few years and Alex going to college later when he found that dog, who really should have known better by then, chewing contentedly on his shoes. He tried to instigate a No-dogs-in-the-closet rule but that just made Carwood laugh until he reconsidered what he'd said and told his partner to grow up. The rest of the afternoon he had to field questions about why Papa Lip wouldn't stop  _grinning_ . Eventually he just growled and stalked out to the woodshed where only Joseph would bother him and that boy knew when to keep quiet. He looked up when the door opened, but only briefly before turning back to the two-by-four he was sawing through.   
  
"Did you say it on purpose?"   
  
The question —and the source— surprised him. He never would have expected as much from Joe, who kept a quieter tongue than he did, some days. He wondered, at times, when the dark and Lipton's warmth made it easy to muse aloud, if the silence had anything to do with Joe's life before they found the boy. He could still remember the pause and then the knowing look in Carwood's eyes directed towards him, and the feel of those hands clutching at him like he might just break apart.   
  
The question reverberated between them and he raised an eyebrow at the boy more like a son to both of them.   
  
"I know you like it when he laughs," Joe shrugged, watching him.   
  
He smiled at the thought and huffed softly with a shake of his head. He hadn't intended to imply the dog was in the closet but he might just have to milk the slip if, hours later, it was still making Carwood smile. It wasn't often something they could laugh about. Usually it made his stomach sour and his knuckles ache like they did after punching an idiot. Joe seemed to get that; they were lucky enough that all the boys seemed to understand about them being together and why it was so importantly a secret. The boys were more grateful for the food, shelter, and support, than wary about all the things people with their predilections were supposed to want to do to little boys.   
  
He dressed up the dog in a pink collar after stopping off on the way home from work the next day and it was worth the trouble to see Carwood turn red with smothered laughter. The kids laughed too, even if they didn't fully understand, because Lip's smile was infectious and that laugh warmed the few pieces still frozen inside of him.   
  
But when Nicholas came home from school with a split lip and a darkening eye, his first instinct was to find the boy responsible and punch somebody's father. As if knowing, Carwood gave him a second's glare and went back to fussing; a wet washcloth and a gentle touch did wonders and it wasn't long before the boy was telling them what he already knew about whispers and some things he didn't know about having two men in your life and no mother. He cursed under his breath, helpless to do anything against the things fourth graders said about the truth but worried just the same. Carwood's hand making bruises on his elbow was a sign that his partner was worried about the rumours resurfacing from adult lips too.   
  
Later, when Nick was safely tucked under the covers between them, he found he couldn't stop staring at the ceiling. There were the faintest of tremors in his fingertips that even Carwood's sure touch couldn't alleviate. He wasn't ready to face the things he could remember of his own split lips and saddened parents, of dinners without his lover, without knowing if he could survive this without hitting someone inappropriate. 0400 rolled around without his eyes closing.   
  
He twitched violently when Nicholas whimpered against his ribs and gathered the boy in his arms. Snagging the knitted throw from the end of the bed on a fingertip, he was careful to let the backdoor swing shut quietly behind them. Carwood found him out there the next morning with Nick against his chest, cocooned in the blanket with barely a hair or a toe showing. His eyes slid from the sunrise to his partner.   
  
"Hi," Carwood smiled, a warm hand rasping over his sleepless cheek.   
  
"He ok?" Lip's voice was soft but those beloved brown eyes were asking more, about himself, his own nightmares, his own memories, and how they were going to fix this for their boy or for themselves. He wanted to look away and pretend he hadn't seen any of it but he shrugged instead and ran a gentle palm over young curls when Nicholas fidgeted in sleep.   
  
"I'll make waffles for breakfast," Carwood said and they both knew that waffles were the boy's favourite. He tilted his head into the good morning kiss and smiled when Papa Lip leant down to brush another on the head resting safe, for the moment, over his heart.   
  
They spoke to the school principal later in the week when Nicholas' bruised jaw was paired with Joseph's upset eyes. When the principal asked them what they thought should be done he wanted to snarl at the man. Carwood's hand brushing against his shoulder had him biting his tongue instead, listening to his wonderful, kind-hearted lover patiently explaining about orphanages and troubled kids to a man that made Herbert Sobel look laid-back.   
  
_He_  could have told them that these boys were no worse than the worst of Dog or Easy only no one but Lipton would have understood. He could have quoted figures of prison statistics for boys raised in loving homes rather than in institutions or in foxholes, or tried to explain how when these boys first came to them, Joseph wouldn't say a word for days and Nicholas wet the bed more nights than not. He could have told them like a proud father about Alex, their first foster, who went from failing the eighth grade a couple times to college after only a short time with them, and who had helped him build the tree house that was still standing. He could have told them about Nick's nightmares and the gentle way Joe had with animals. But he wasn't about to demand the world treat his boys a certain way when he couldn't find that for himself or Carwood. No matter how much he wanted to keep them safe.   
  
He frowned, watching the principal nodding along with Lipton's speech and knew that nothing would be done. If only because there was nothing to do that didn't involve Carwood leaving him for marriage with a woman who deserved better than to never be loved in that  _right_  way. When he asked later why Carwood tried to change minds anymore, Lip replied that it was necessary for plausible deniability and a good alibi when Joe started, miraculously, to learn the best way to defend a little brother. He smiled, then, and kissed his partner in the front hall of their home just to hear the boys groan and complain about how gross their fathers were. He liked the way the possessive "parents" tasted on Papa Lipton's tongue.   
  
As they sat around the dinner table that night with the shadow of Nick's bruises hanging over them, he knew he wasn't looking forward to when their littlest, Nathan, was ready for schoolyard bullies. He hated how easy it was to be grateful that their boys had come to them already knowing how to keep secrets. He hated what they had to ask of their sons but the thought of never touching Carwood, never loving that man again made him shake whenever it snuck up on him.   
  
It was Joe, one Saturday afternoon with sawdust beneath their fingertips and woodchips at their feet, who managed to voice badly worded, fully felt gratitude. "I love you and Papa Lip, Dad," was the whisper against his shoulder. "I don't care that you're— like that. You're good to me, good to  _us_ . And that's real. The rest doesn't matter."   
  
He'd tried to clear his throat but Joe seemed to understand that a shoulder squeeze and dashing his eyes as they pulled apart were eloquent on their own. He struggled again, later, trying to explain to his partner why fostering those boys was something he could never regret. Carwood just looked at him like it wasn't something new and pulled him down onto their sheets for lazy kisses before Nathan awoke from nightmares that rivalled theirs, fresh from the war.   
  
  
Training his boys to defend themselves was something he'd started with Alex when the boy had asked. It had given him nightmares that he wouldn't admit to at first, his hands shaking because he couldn't stand the thought of even accidentally giving his boy bruises. It made him think of violence and the war and how, when they got back to the warmth of the States, to the bubblegum and the sunshine, he found that he hated the winter. Even now he hated the way the frost flecked the window panes, the way the snow drifted across the fields, clumping on the willow's branches. He hated it because being cold reminded him of sleeping in foxholes, but he hated it more because it reminded Carwood of Hoobler, Muck, and Penkala, of Toye and Guarnere in pieces. He hated it because there weren't enough blankets or inches of his body when Carwood started to shiver like that. They could both smell gunpowder on the clear winter air.   
  
Of course, he also hated midsummer, when July fourth and fireworks rolled around. That's when for an instant Carwood would laugh and smile at the lights but then would remember and there would be nothing in those eyes. It bothered him because he knew how much Lipton loved the colours; it was just the sound, the smell, and the smoke that got to them.   
  
Sometimes he would wake up tasting Carwood's blood. It was not a wholly unexpected nightmare but it disturbed him all the more because he had a visceral memory of the taste like old pennies warmed from someone's hand. He could still remember how the guns had slowed and his heart had pounded; he had bit off a scream and killed the nearest German. From the rumours later, he took out half the enemy battalion single-handed; he didn't care how many so long as he got the one man responsible for the spray of A+ blood across the snow.   
  
When he woke safe in their bed, with one of the dogs at their feet and maybe a little body full of elbows and knees between them, all he could see were those beautiful brown eyes glazed with pain, trying to reassure him while at the same time begging for the hurt to stop. He could still remember those lips covered in blood and how helpless he was against the need to taste them. He had clutched at the injured man, unable to let him go even after the sound of NIxon's cleared throat kicked in. He opened his eyes to see Nix slapping money into Doc Roe's palm but all he had eyes for was the injured man beneath his hands. Lipton's face was soft, like things were better, even temporarily. He couldn't stop himself from smiling at the man, pressing his palm to a grubby, stubbled cheek. Only Nixon's throat stopped him from ducking down to his Carwood again. He glared at the Captain but it was half-hearted at best when Lipton was squeezing their fingers together like it didn't matter that anyone was watching. It hadn't mattered that Lewis hauled him aside and told him  _never_  to do that anywhere but in private again, because by then Roe had told him that Lip would be fine. He could safely ignore the worry on Nix's face for the healing censure on Lipton's once the Second Lieutenant remembered to berate him for acting so impulsively and stupidly. He had sighed, apologized, and not meant it at all.   
  
But often times he would still wake up, sweating with a curse on his tongue to see brown eyes watching him, occasionally accompanied by a rounded face too young for him to say a word about the echoes of gunfire in his head. Carwood would send the little body back to its bed with a dog or two in tow and would haul him close until his eyes stopped stinging. When Lipton dreamt first, he was less gentle about emptying the room and pinning Carwood to the mattress until neither of them could talk about it.   
  
He had always found it difficult to talk about what was bothering him. He could still remember standing in his Mama's kitchen, listening to her hum as she baked some sort of cookies, and trying to work up the courage to tell her that Johnny McCallum had pushed him into the mud at school and now his new rain jacket was dirty. When she finally turned around, he was halfway out the door and he didn't listen when she called him back. He washed the mud off with the hose and didn't even try to meet his father's eye when the man asked him about it. He never said a word when the fabric was still cold and clammy the next morning but by then his mama had hidden two of his favourite shortbread cookies in his lunch pail and that made him feel better like little else could.   
  
Sometimes he could still taste those cookies; or it felt like he could. He knew that if he mentioned missing them, Carwood would bake and make until the recipe in the mail fit his memories. But it was still difficult to mention aloud the things that bothered him when he was trying to sleep, or sitting on the porch with an ice tea in his hand, or in the middle of the hardware store waiting for Lipton to finish in the gardening section, since he was no longer allowed in there after showing the boys how to mix the perfect mud to ruin a lady's Sunday-best shoes. Or when Carwood was out wooing some woman that he couldn't help hoping wouldn't like his lover, all the while knowing that was impossible because Carwood Lipton was imminently likeable. And sometimes it wasn't any one thing that was bothering him, nothing he could pick out of a line-up or that Carwood could read on his face. Sometimes he would just get restless and uneasy and feel like he didn't quite fit in his skin or his home or his life. That's when he was most grateful that Carwood didn't make him say anything at all.   
  
He'd felt it before, in Dog more than Easy. When his uniform just wouldn't fit; tight and chaffing one minute and too loose the next. He'd mentioned it to Carwood and Lipton just asked him if it was worse the night before or after a battle. He never had to tell Carwood what it was to wake up covered in blood and not know if it was his own; to throw up after mess because everything tasted like gunpowder and dirt. He didn't have to tell Carwood because Carwood already knew.   
  
And when one of their boys asked him, hesitant and quiet, about the things that made him shake and Carwood pale, he told them about the evil that men do and how hate isn't ever any reason to kill someone and neither is love. The sidearm he'd brought back was cold and heavy in his fingers. He never let them hold it but he was still close enough to taste the tang of gunpowder. They would look at him, then, like he was making it all sound so exciting, until he would tell them about one day at the end of the war and a camp of nightmares. A camp that neither he, nor Papa Lip could really bring themselves to talk about.   
  
But then he got to tell them about getting a package in the mail that weighed more than usual and contained a piece of the war he'd left behind in Landsberg. Time had dented the edges of his old canteen, left behind in one of those horror camps, and there was a new inscription beside his name and serial number on the bottom. Sometimes he would run a trembling fingertip over the scratchy letters spelling " _Ronald Speirs - In tiefster Dankbarkeit. Ihre Familie, Cassewitz_ ," all the ways to say "thank you" in a language he understood in gists. The letter that came with it, once translated, explained about a father who had survived on kindness until that body was strong once more, who went on to have children that were raised right and who, upon their father's passing, thought the paratrooper responsible for their father's life should have back a piece of the history between them.   
  
He never made it through that story, holding that canteen in his lap, without blinking away the stinging behind his eyelids. Carwood always found him with a boy in his lap and a quietness between them that would last until the next snow and fresh snowballs or the next trip to the beach and being tossed into the waves.   
  
He always held Carwood a little tighter on nights after, dreamed a little rougher. Lip just kissed his temple and ran a hand down his spine like that could chase the nightmares away. He was just grateful for the touches; that's when he knew he wasn't alone. He had Carwood Lipton to remind him of that. Every year on their non-anniversary when they went to a fancy restaurant far out of town and he had to glare at every woman in the room because Lip looked so defile-able in a well-tailored suit, he was once again grateful not to be alone. Linking their fingers on the walk back to the car, he smiled at his yearly lover and was, for a heartbeat, grateful for this war that had brought them together. Otherwise he would have found his way to Huntington  without knowing what he was looking for. Because despite rare fights about child-rearing, dogs eating his shoes and sleeping on his shirts, and the best way to keep their secret something that never got past the infrequent-whispers stage, he knew that a life without Carwood wouldn't have been a life he would have wanted.   
  
He had already lived a lifetime of sitting alone at mess and fielding inquisitive, fearful glares; it was wearing down those fragile, soft pieces within him waiting to be wings. Meeting Carwood was like relaxing and coming alive at once. Meeting his lover's gaze in the rising moonlight, the ground beneath their willow tree a little cold but not enough to make a difference, he reached out a steady hand to cup a stubbled cheek. He grinned when a brush of thumb across scar tissue got an involuntary shiver and leant close to steal a kiss.   
  
"I love you." His voice was quiet but thick with all the things it always was when he managed to confess himself.   
  
"I love you," Carwood agreed and they settled together, intwined and content until the sun rose, the kids flooded from the house, and another day demanded them. He stored that night next to the others in his memory, one more building block, one more bit of mortar to anchor himself to the man he wanted to be, just for Carwood Lipton. It got easier the more he stopped thinking about it and started following Lip's lead; the less frequently he found himself with a split-second glare, stomped toes, or a familiar elbow in the ribs. He much preferred that surprised-proud smile and a soft kiss when they were alone again.  _That_  was worth almost anything in the world.   
  
  
**End.**   
  
  
Note: " _Ronald Speirs - In tiefster Dankbarkeit. Ihre Familie Cassewitz_ " is supposed to say something like " _Ronald Speirs - With the most heartfelt thanks. Your family, Cassewitz._ "


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Does it hurt?" asked the [Velveteen] Rabbit.  
>  "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."_
> 
>  
> 
> An exploration in Speirs. This is a look at the biggest bad-ass of Easy, from a young age living with his parents in Maine to old age living with his partner, Second Lieutenant C. Carwood Lipton, in Montana. How did he go from being the quiet boy no one wanted on their baseball team in PE (even if he could run the bases faster than anyone else) to being the quiet foster father of four? From being a war hero and CO of Easy Company to being a handyman that all the women in the neighbourhood called upon? From being rumour-riddled and nightmare-haunted to being loved and care-worn? This is the story of how Ronald C. Speirs became Real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With regards to the "Character death" warning - men die in war and men grow old. That's the way that life goes and I cannot avoid that. Unfortunately, neither can these characters.

**Epilogue.**  
It was quiet in the house by himself. He had to forcefully remind himself that it was not the stillness before a mortar attack or the utter nothing with his lover suddenly gone. Rather, it was a house with his partner no longer in it and the kids all grown up and flown the coop like proper little paratroopers.  
  
It was always Sundays when he missed them all the most, like one day could make a difference. It was Sunday afternoons when he sat at the window and watched the sun hitting the white cross beneath the willow tree because Lipton had always said there shouldn't be anything fancy. That a plain white cross under their favourite tree would be enough, no matter where that body was buried. But when it came right down to it, he couldn't go through with it. Carwood got a white cross, yellowed in the past six years, but there was also a beautiful chunk of stone with C. Carwood Lipton scrawled into it, just waiting for Ronald C. Speirs to lay down his head in the plot beside, because they could lie together in death as no one could know in life.  
  
When he could work up the courage, the grass between the bark and painted wood was always a little bit warm, like Carwood's side of the bed, and a little bit damp. In the silence of a dappled afternoon, he could bring himself to whisper all the things he hadn't been saying all week about how his hands shook with arthritis now and how hard it was to go out knowing he'd be coming home to an empty house. He cried, sometimes, but he always tried to remind himself that Carwood had never thought less of him for it; he doubted the man would now.  
  
Over the course of his weeks spent waiting for Sunday afternoon, the echoes seemed to fade a bit. With each call from Nicholas and little grand-baby voices whispered into the phone, he felt a little better. When Joseph called to tell him that there was a room for him if he wanted, he spent all night outside to watch the stars with Carwood like they used to.  
  
Dawn didn't give him any answers and his fingers were shaking as they dialed the Maine number. He found himself thanking his son but refusing the offer to move away from Carwood's tree and the life they had lived here. The little reminders like a scrap of "Ron's To Do" list in that familiar, lost handwriting, unearthed from beneath the bed, could still bite like shrapnel but he liked the way the floorboards creaked under his shuffling steps in the morning because he could remember how Lip used to let him sneak up, when the man was feeling particularly magnanimous. He liked the mis-painted porch and the memory-soaked stillness of his workshop.  
  
"There's always space for you, dad," he heard, because Carwood was always 'Papa Lip' even though neither of them knew why. He knew from Joe that meant 'I love you' and he swallowed twice around the lump in his throat before he could tell his son to take care of that beautiful family waiting. He made noises about flying out for Christmas but they both knew that he wouldn't. He hadn't been on a plane since they landed in 1945. He wouldn't without Carwood; it felt wrong to be in a plane without the man and, anyway, he wasn’t crazy about landing. It felt more natural to jump out with a gun in his hands and a hundred pounds on his back.  
  
The kids didn’t seem to begrudge him and he was grateful in ways he couldn't slip past a tied tongue. He told himself he'd make extra sure he called Joseph for the 40th birthday coming up but without a familiar mouth forming 'Call your son' noises, he probably wouldn't remember even if he stapled a post-it to his own forehead. He would respond dutifully to every letter sent him and send birthday cards with money inside for each of the grandkids he rarely saw but it was easier to get by when he didn't try to break the silence of the house, most days. The only reason he made himself answer the phone each and every time it rang was that he never knew when it was going to be bad news and  _that_  was always harder to take in writing. He still had a copy of the Second Lieutenant's transfer orders before they were rescinded, and of C. Carwood Lipton's obituary, dutifully clipped and pressed but never read. Those were words he did not need bouncing around in his head.  
  
Joe was telling him, quietly, about the crazy things those teenaged-babies had done that week. The laughter in that voice filled the room and he smiled with it. He tucked those memories close to his chest where Carwood still fit. All around the house there were pieces, flashes of good things to remember and he breathed them in whenever he woke up screaming from shadows of the things he wished he couldn’t still remember so clearly.  
  
Sometime he would call Alex or Nicholas because his 0300 was their 1200. Most times he couldn't force out a word but they always seemed to know it was him and he got to hear about grandbabies and the spouses that were more like children anyway. He could still remember meeting Alex's Marjorie and when Nathan shakily told them that a boy's smile could mean just as much as the soft curves of a girl. He always found himself smiling at the proud, emotional twinkle in Lipton's eye each and every time.  
  
"I love you," he whispered to the sunshine of a summer Sunday beneath the willow tree. He leant his head back, feeling the coarse bark against the soft, age-speckled skin creeping through his hair. He threaded tired hands across his belly and smiled when a breeze he'd felt a thousand times ruffled the worn corner of an old handkerchief. He fell asleep as the sun crept up his shoes and the warmth made his hands stop shaking. Dawn broke the next morning and he slept on, peaceful beneath the willow beside his Carwood, a velveteen soldier.   
  


 

 

_"[Becoming Real] doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the 2010 War Big Bang on livejournal, this fic is accompanied by [amazing art](http://flyingmachine.livejournal.com/249696.html) done by flyingmachine and a [great fanmix](http://zellersee.livejournal.com/18980.html) put together by vertrauen of livejournal.
> 
> A special thanks to Don, my beta for this project.
> 
> Originally posted at [my livejournal](http://bookstorequeer.livejournal.com/91738.html).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Fuse And The Ammunition (Fanmix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4652199) by [keatsinqueue (crediniaeth)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crediniaeth/pseuds/keatsinqueue)




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